Announcing the Winners of CSWR'S Inaugural Peripheries Poetry Competition

In the fall of 2024, the CSWR’s Poetry and Creative Writing program, led by Sherah Bloor, Editor-in-Chief of Peripheries, launched its inaugural poetry competition. Over a few weeks, we received more than 750 submissions from 250 talented poets.

Peripheries’s dedicated team of readers—HDS master’s students Sarah Adegbite, Ethan Kober, Sophia Snyder, Tara Yazdan Panah, and Wawa—carefully reviewed each submission, creating a longlist that was narrowed down to a shortlist of 23 entries. These finalists were then judged by Joshua Bell, Senior Lecturer on Poetry at Harvard University’s Department of English.

We are thrilled to announce the winners of the competition:

First Prize: Alinh Dolinh for “Dream Sequence Stricken from a Tapestry”
Second Prize: Alan Yan for “Impossible Blue”

Both poems will be featured in Issue 7 of Peripheries, CSWR’s annual literary and arts journal, set for release in May 2025. The poets will read the winning poems at Peripheries’s launch. 

Commenting on the first-prize-winning poem, Josh Bell said, “The odd, blazing breadth of tone and diction here—britomartian to gorget, cellophaned to heft—is the announcement of an arrival, of a world coming into focus. The voice is big and rolling but also careful, local, specific. The poem is strange, funny, exhilarating. The world it moves through is frightening and grand. We might be punctured, and we will be tested.”

Congratulations to the winners, and heartfelt thanks to everyone who participated in making this inaugural competition a success!

Poets’ biographical notes: 

Aline Dolinh is a writer and publishing worker who received her MFA in poetry from Boston University and currently lives in Somerville, MA. Her poems have appeared in underblong, The Rumpus, Passages North, RHINO, and Frontier Poetry, among other publications.

Alan Yan is a poet based in Brooklyn, NY. His poems have appeared in The Westchester Review and in the anthology The Poetry of Grief, Gratitude, and Reverence. His haiku have appeared in Modern Haiku, The Heron's Nest, Presence, Kingfisher, NOON, and other journals.