Fiction Writer, Poet, Playwright, Educator, Memoir Writer and Literary Critic
I am the past president of the Michigan College English Association. I have a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago. I have published four poetry books: Nature's Olympics (Wipf and Stock, 2021), Exodus (WordTech Communications, 2014), Folk Concert: Changing Times (Anaphora Literary Press, 2012) and Traffic Stop (Finishing Line Press, 2011). My scholarly book, Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Reader of Drama, was published in 1990 by the University of Missouri Press. My fiction picture book about bullying for children, How the Moon Regained Her Shape (Arbordale, 2006; 7th edn. 2022), has won four national awards. My play The Cell Phone won fourth place in a national contest and was performed twice at the Fenton Village Players One-Act Play Festival on June 24-25, 2011 in Fenton, Michigan. Triton College produced another play, Pledging, as part of its Tritonysia Play Festival in May 2017. Choeofpleirn Press published Pledging in Rushing Through the Dark (2022).
Novelist Gloria Goldreich reviewed Janet Ruth Heller’s middle-grade chapter book The Passover Surprise in Hadassah Magazine in December 2016 (page 69). Here is the review. In Janet Ruth Heller’s The Passover Surprise (illustrated by Ronald Kauffman; Fictive Press, 48 pp….
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Key to the City (1950) is a black-and-white film that stars Clark Gable (Steve Fisk) and Loretta Young (Clarissa Standish) as small-town mayors who meet and fall in love while attending a convention of mayors in San Francisco. The director…
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Recently, I was talking with my three-year-old great-nephew Wesley. Like many toddlers, he often uses the word “No!” As I spoke with him, I realized that he may use “No!” to mean something different than adults do when they use…
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