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 is the past president of the Michigan College English Association and a past president of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature. She has a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago. Heller has published four poetry books: Nature’s Olympics (Wipf and Stock, 2021), Exodus (WordTech Editions, 2014), Folk Concert: Changing Times (Anaphora Literary Press, 2012), and Traffic Stop (Finishing Line Press, 2011); a scholarly book, Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Reader of Drama (University of Missouri Press, 1990); a middle-grade fiction chapter book for children, The Passover Surprise (Fictive Press, 2015, 2016); and a fiction picture book for children about bullying, How the Moon Regained Her Shape (Arbordale, 2006; 7th edition 2022), that has won four national awards, including a Children’s Choices award. Her website is https://www.janetruthheller.com
“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:
Anaphora Literary Press 
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