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Poet hudson7/23/2023 ![]() Although Van Prooyen now lives and works in San Antonio, she said the two have kept in touch over the last several years through a writing group and have continued sharing their work with each other. Publisher Laura Van Prooyen, founder of Next Page Press, met Hudson during a joint book reading at Women & Children First, an independent Chicago bookstore. “I think there is local knowledge and local interest in the Radium Girls, (and) I hope that also piques people’s curiosity.” “Just by chance, these two pieces of art are intersecting in our community at the same time,” Hudson said. Hudson also said she recently heard of an upcoming production of the play “Radium Girls” taking place at Loyola University Chicago. In her writing, Hudson said she hopes to reach people across different disciplines – scientists, historians and appreciators of poetry alike. Rather, people should examine its applications and uses. Radium itself is not good or evil, Hudson said. “I hope it’s a glimpse of a world that is more complicated than the kind of binary that we often use when we evaluate something.” “(‘Glow’) is certainly a story that is full of heartbreak, but I also hope that it is a story full of perseverance and hope,” Hudson said. The Radium Dial Company managers positioned hundreds of women in Ottawa to be poisoned while they painted watch dials with self-luminous paint and licked their brushes to keep them sharp. The Radium Girls were factory workers in the 1920s who became part of a larger phenomenon of radiation poisoning taking place in facilities across the U.S. “Glow,” she said, explores the complexities and fascinating nature of radium rather than defining the metal as good or bad. Inspired by that encounter and finding the story of radium “unsettling and interesting,” Hudson said she couldn’t keep herself from writing on the topic and released her chapbook, a short book of poems, titled “Glow,” on Oct. The Radium Girl statue struck a chord with Hudson because of her prior interest in Marie Curie, the scientist who discovered radium and worked to find treatments for cancer, as well as Hudson’s father’s career in science. While researching her family ties in Ottawa, Evanston poet Ann Hudson “stumbled upon” the inspiration for her latest poetry chapbook: a statue of a Radium Girl.
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