Janet Ruth Heller

By: Janet Ruth Heller

Folk Concert: Changing Times($15 – Click to Order, ISBN: 978-1-937536-26-8, Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-68114-165-7, 6X9″, LCCN#: 2012939912, 90pp) concerns the journey of becoming a woman during difficult times.  Themes include feminism, love relationships, college teaching, nature, psychotherapy, travel, the anti-Vietnam War movement, family, the life of an artist/entertainer/writer, and music.

* Pushcart Prize Nominee for 2012

* Textbook in  Penelope Stickney’s “Introduction to Poetry” course at Kankakee Community College  in the Fall 2012 semester.

Janet Ruth Heller has published the poetry chapbook Traffic Stop (Finishing Line Press, 2011), the scholarly book Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Reader of Drama (University of Missouri Press, 1990), and the award-winning children’s fiction picture book about bullying How the Moon Regained Her Shape (Sylvan Dell, 2006).  She has a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago.  Janet is a past president of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, and she is currently president of the Michigan College English Association.  Janet lives in Portage, Michigan, with her husband. Her hobbies are hiking, singing, and bird-watching.

“Heller employs simple language – language that is fundamentally folk – which captures in its aforementioned clear-cut rhythm a sound that effectively shows us the allures of activism, on scales either small or large, in the realms of both public and private life.” –Women’s Studies, 41:1010-1, 2012. Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group, “In Brief”

“Folk Concert: Changing Times, by Janet Ruth Heller, captures small everyday moments with matter-of-fact grace and humor. The powerful understatement of these rich, precise poems swells and reverberates. They sing with political commitment, emotional commitment, and a lifetime of paying attention.” –Jim Daniels, author of Trigger Man, and Having a Little Talk with Capital P Poetry

“Janet Ruth Heller’s poems in Folk Concert: Changing Times work hard for clarity. They feel like clear water, but they have the cumulative power of a summer storm. Her family and nature poems are particularly moving.” –Marge Piercy, author of The Hunger Moon: New & Selected Poems, 1980-2010, Circles on the Water: New and Selected Poems 1960-1980, and The Moon is Always Female

Interview:

Reading Recommendations