Poetry, Philosophy, and Religion

CSWR Poetry Series: With Sholeh Wolpé The Invisible Sun is the first comprehensive English collection of poetry by the twelfth-century Persian mystic Attar, revered by Rumi as his master. Translated by award-winning poet Sholeh Wolpé, this luminous...

On October 8, 2025, in the CSWR Common Room, the CSWR and Sherah Bloor, Editor-in-Chief of Peripheries, hosted a celebration of the publication of Study of Sorrow: Translations (Copper Canyon Press, October 2025). Shangyang Fang read his translations of...

On November 13, 2025 the CSWR and Sherah Bloor, Editor-in-Chief of Peripheries, hosted three poets—Laynie Browne, Julie Carr, and Chloe Garcia Roberts—who read from their new books, each engaging in its own way in an intertextual communion with the living...

Peripheries is a journal of word, image, and sound that crosses thresholds between genres, senses, languages, and traditions. This seventh edition explores poetry—and art—as a habitable space, a room of sorts. After all, “stanza” comes from the Italian...

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...

On September 19, 2024, the CSWR hosted Adrie Kusserow who read from her recently released work, The Trauma Mantras. Other readers at the event included local poets Yena Sharma Purmasir and Zia Polis. The Trauma Mantras is a memoir written by medical...

On September 9, 2024, the CSWR hosted our first poetry event of the academic year. The reading featured four poets: Jackie Wang, Stephanie Burt, Nat Raha, and Ethan Seeley. Jackie Wang is the author of the poetry collection The Sunflower Cast a Spell to...

In the now-globalized culture that has descended from the European Enlightenment, poetry and philosophy are frequently considered mutually exclusive endeavors. Culture would also include a culture highly skeptical of anything that might be termed...

As Nietzsche described the death of God, so philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard described the death of the real. He forwards a sense of a reality crushed by cloning chamber and the "saming" Babel of the internet, Disneyland, reality television...