Martien Halvorson-Taylor (PhD, Harvard University), Associate Professor at the University of Virginia, is a scholar of the Hebrew Bible. Her research focuses on the Babylonian Exile as formative for ancient Judaism and the origins of the Bible. She is the author of Enduring Exile: The Metaphorization of Exile in the Hebrew Bible (Brill, 2011) and co-edited Women and Exilic Identity in the Hebrew Bible (T&T Clark, 2018) and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on Biblical Exile & Forced Migration. She is completing a commentary on the Song of Songs (Kohlhammer, forthcoming), an erotic love poem in the Bible that says what cannot otherwise be said. She authored Writing the Bible (Audible/Great Courses) and co-hosts the podcast Sacred & Profane, bringing deep scholarship to a wide audience. With her students, Halvorson-Taylor, an award-winning teacher, explores how biblical narratives (Esther, Genesis) and poetry (Song of Songs, Job) have been interpreted to address enduring human questions.