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Janet Ruth Heller

Author's Bio

My poetry book Traffic Stop was published by Finishing Line Press (2011). I have a Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago. Currently, I am president of the Michigan College English Association. I co-founded Primavera, an award-winning literary journal. My scholarly book, Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Reader of Drama, was published by the University of Missouri Press (1990). My creative nonfiction essay “Returning to Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin” appeared in Midwestern Miscellany (2008). My play The Cell Phone won fourth place in a national contest and was performed at the Fenton Village Players One Act Play Festival on June 24-25, 2011, in Fenton, Michigan. My fiction picture book about bullying for children, How the Moon Regained Her Shape (Sylvan Dell, 2006), won a Book Sense Pick (2006), a Children’s Choices selection (2007), a Benjamin Franklin Award (2007), and a Gold Medal in the Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards (2007).

Publications and Prizes

Books:
Traffic Stop (Finishing Line Press, 2011), How the Moon Regained Her Shape (Sylvan Dell Publishing, 2006)
Anthologies:
Modern Poems on the Bible (Jewish Publication Society, 1994), Women's Glib: A Collection of Women's Humor (Crossing Press, 1991)
Journals:
Anima, Midstream, Minnesota Review
Prizes:
My fiction picture book about bullying for children, How the Moon Regained Her Shape (Sylvan Dell, 2006), won a Book Sense Pick (2006), a Children’s Choices selection (2007), a Benjamin Franklin Award (2007), and a Gold Medal in the Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards (2007). In 2009, How the Moon Regained Her Shape was one of five finalists for the Patricia Gallagher Picture Book Award given by the Oregon Reading Association. My play The Cell Phone won fourth place in a national contest and was performed at the Fenton Village Players One Act Play Festival on June 24-25, 2011, in Fenton, Michigan. Primavera, a journal that I co-founded, has won awards from Chicago Women in Publishing and the Illinois Arts Council and grants from CCLM and the NEA. My poem "Moving In" won the Friends of Poetry annual contest for 1989 and was displayed in buses in Kalamazoo, Michigan. With the other winners, I gave a poetry reading at the Kalamazoo Art Center and videotaped a poetry reading for cable television. My poetry book manuscript was a Finalist for the Richard Snyder Memorial Poetry Prize given by Ashland Poetry Press, judged by Robert Phillips, in 2005.

Personal Favorites

What I'm Reading Now:
Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon, Navaho Folk Tales by Franc Johnson Newcomb, Miriam's Tambourine: Jewish Folktakes from around the World by Edited by Howard Schwartz, The Book of Seventy by Alicia Ostriker
Favorite Authors:
S. T. Coleridge, W. B. Yeats, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Margaret Atwood, Alicia Ostriker, Adrienne Rich, Dylan Thomas, Oscar Wilde, William Wordsworth, Jorge Guillen, Judith Minty, Athol Fugard, Federico Garcia Lorca, William Shakespeare, Hart Crane, Seamus Heaney, Toni Cade Bambara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Gail Griffin, Lisel Mueller, Robert Burns, Jim Daniels, Grace Paley, Yehudah HaLevi, Yehudah Amichai, Maxine Kumin

Please note: All information in the Directory is provided by the writers listed in it.
Listing last updated: June 13, 2011

More Information

Listed as:
Poet
Gives readings?
Yes
Travels for readings?
Yes
Identifies as:
Jewish
Prefers to work with:
Any
Fluent in:
Spanish
Born in:
Milwaukee, WI
Raised in:
Milwaukee, WI

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