Alex Braslavsky is a scholar and translator of Russian, Polish, and Czech poetry. Her interests include Russian poetry of the Silver Age, Polish poetry of the Skamander poetic movement, and Czechoslovak Surrealist poetry. She aims to work in both tradition-based and comparative ways between and amongst Slavic poetic traditions. For her dissertation, she intends to focus on the poet’s hiatus: what happens when a poet departs for the shadows and reneges society for a substantial amount of time? How does a self-elected period of silence reflect in a given poet’s body of work, both in the before and after?