The Photographer
By: Janet Heller
I dream that I’m the photographer at your divorce.
Standing with your new lover, you pose,
a spidery smile on your face.
Now I capture your ex-husband in my lens:
his grey eyes plead:
he wants me to intervene.
After you ran away, I urged you to return.
We met together. But you refused,
and your seducer called the police.
As I mourn for estranged friends,
memories cling to my skin and clothes
like tobacco smoke.
I am the past president of the Michigan College English Association and the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature. 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 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. 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). My fiction picture book for children about bullying, How the Moon Regained Her Shape, won a Book Sense Pick (2006), a Benjamin Franklin Award (2007), a Children’s Choices award (2007), and a Gold Medal in the Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards (2007). In 2009, How the Moon Regained Her Shape was also one of five finalists for the Patricia Gallagher Picture Book Award given by the Oregon Reading Association. I have taught literature, women's studies, composition, and creative writing at Michigan State University, Northern Illinois University, Nazareth College, Western Michigan University, Albion College, Grand Valley State University, Olivet College, and the University of Chicago. I am a founding mother of the Rape Crisis Center in Madison, Wisconsin. I also co-founded the Professional Instructors Organization union at Western Michigan University. I served on the women’s advisory board for the public television station WGVU in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I am a past president of the Ladies’ Library Association in Kalamazoo, a charitable nonprofit organization devoted to literacy, education, the arts, and culture.IG | X | Website