Two University of Mary Washington faculty members will be featured on the With Good Reason (WGR) public radio show throughout the next two weeks. Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing Laura Bylenok and Assistant Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich will share their expertise on separate episodes with listeners across the country.
Bylenok, an award-winning poet who stitches together her love of science with her passion for the written word, will read from her recent collection on WGR’s Poetry That Heals, airing March 16 to 22. Hansen-Glucklich, who studies how museums in the U.S., Berlin and Jerusalem portray the Holocaust, will be featured on Finding Marginalized Jewish Voices in Selma, Alabama, March 23 to 29. Produced by Virginia Humanities for the Virginia Higher Education Broadcasting Consortium, With Good Reason airs on 100 stations in 33 states.
“In college, [Bylenok] was fascinated with genetic engineering. Now, she manipulates language, not DNA,” says the show’s description. “Her recent book turns familiar forms into poetic laboratory experiments.”
Sharing selections from her book Warp, winner of the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize, Bylenok describes her fascination with molecular biology and genetics, explaining her use of the words and concepts they conjure to put the human condition into prose. An inspiration for her poem Genome, she tells WGR host Sarah McConnell, before reading the piece on air, is a haunting image left by a past professor, an endocrinologist who sewed together pairs of living rats.
Bylenok, who teaches Intro to Creative Writing and Writing Poetry: Radical Forms at UMW, holds a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing from the University of Utah. In addition to Warp, she also wrote a/0, published in 2014, and her work has appeared in such publications as Best New Poets, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, Crazyhorse, North American Review and Guernica. She is currently working on a manuscript exploring the overlap between scientific inquiry and lyric poetry.
Hansen-Glucklich relates to WGR listeners the results of her extensive reviews of three Holocaust museums – Israel’s Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Germany’s Jewish Museum in Berlin and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C. Her book, Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums and the Challenges of Representation, chronicles her observations of the architecture and exhibits of each, and how they communicate the Holocaust narrative within specific cultural contexts.
“How does a nation deal with its own crimes? How does it represent itself as a perpetrator?” Hansen-Glucklich asks on the show. Often, she explains, museums across Germany and Austria do so by telling the story of the Holocaust from the victims’ point of view. “This is very important to give them back their voice,” she said.
Hansen-Glucklich holds a Ph.D. in Germanic languages and literatures from the University of Virginia. She has been a visiting professor at the Universität Wien and the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, and held fellowships at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the USHMM and with the German Academic Exchange Service. She is currently working on a book about German Jewish immigrants to Israel in the 1930s.
With Good Reason airs Sundays at 2 p.m. in Fredericksburg on Radio IQ 88.3 Digital. A complete list of broadcast times and audio files of the full programs (posted the week of the show) can be found online at www.withgoodreasonradio.org.
