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Poetry Leaves anthology publishes a poem about the Chicago blizzard of 1979

My poem “January Blizzard” was recently printed in Poetry Leaves: Adult Contemporary Anthology, edited by Emily Kazmierczak and published by the Waterford Township Public Library, 2020, on page 75.  Poetry Leaves submissions come from all over the world.

There was going to be an exhibit of all of the poems at the library in Waterford, Michigan from May 20 to June 3, 2020, but that got canceled due to the coronavirus epidemic. 

I had been trying to get “January Blizzard” published since February 1979.  I wrote it after about two feet of snow fell on Chicago, where I was living and teaching at the time.  The city administration had trouble dealing with all of the snow, and the resulting mess helped Jane Byrne to get elected mayor, the first woman to hold this position.


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Janet Ruth Heller reading her poems at the Kalamazoo Public Library; photo by Hedy Habra

Janet Ruth Heller

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).