Volume 7 of Peripheries Explores Spirituality, Memory, and the Arts

The Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School will mark the release of the seventh volume of Peripheries: A Journal of Word, Image, and Sound with a public launch featuring readings, art, and multimedia installations on May 1.

This year’s edition of Peripheries houses six guest-edited folios on special topics, including the poetics of rooms (Amanda Gunn), nonfiction poetry (Jessica Wilkinson), and Yiddish translation (HDS alum, Danny Kraft). Editor-in-Chief, Sherah Bloor, says “we curated this collection as an enfilade: a series of adjacent “rooms,” each containing its own atmosphere, archive of objects, and quality of light.”

The journal’s in-house collections constitutes a seventh exhibition room of multifarious material: musical scores, archival photography, and Arabic, Chinese, and Polish translations. The journal features some of the most celebrated poets writing today alongside emerging artists, and includes craft talks by Tracy K. Smith and Don Revell, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Phillips headlines the evening’s program. Amanda Gunn, author of Things I Didn’t Do with This Body, will read new poetry and introduce her folio. The inaugural Peripheries Poetry Prize winners, Aline Dolinh and Alan Yan will also read their award-winning work.

The event will take place on Thursday, May 1, 2025, from 6:00 to 7:00 PM in 110 Thompson Room at the Barker Center, 12 Quincy Street in Cambridge, and will be followed by a reception and an immersive exhibition of visual and multimedia work from the journal.

Attendance is free, but registration is encouraged. Guests are invited to register here to attend either in person or via Zoom.

Peripheries is published annually by Harvard Divinity School and seeks to bring together emerging and established artists and writers whose work explores the liminal spaces between genres, languages, and traditions, often speaking from spiritual, artistic, and existential peripheries.