Shattering the Glass Ceiling

Janet Kuypers was honored multiple years at Carl Sandburg High School and on the Dean's List and graduating with a Communications degree in News/Editorial Journalism (starting in computer science engineering studies) from the UIUC. She had the equivalent of a minor in photography and specialized in creative writing. A portrait photographer for years in the early 1990s, she was also an acquaintance rape workshop facilitator, and she started her publishing career as an editor of two literary magazines. Later she was an art director, webmaster and photographer for a few magazines for a publishing company in Chicago, and, after getting married, she became a certified minister was was the officiant of a wedding in 2006. This Journalism major was even the fina featured poetry performer of 15 poets featuring at the 2006 Society of Professional Journalism Expo's Chicago Poetry Showcase. One of her 2019 Periodic Poetry poems also was a contest winner, announced by Science & Engineering News.

She sang with acoustic bands "Mom's Favorite Vase", "Weeds and Flowers" and "the Second Axing", and does music sampling. Kuypers is published in books, magazines and on the internet over 10,000 times for writing, and over 17,800 times for art work in her professional career (she also has frequented the Internet with videos of readings), and has been profiled in such magazines as Nation and Discover U, her poetry was nominated for the Pushcart Prize multiple times, won the award for a Poetry Ambassador and has been Poet of the Year. She has also been highlighted on radio stations, including WEFT Champaign radio (90.1FM), WLUW chicago Radio (88.7FM), WSUM Madison, WI radio, KOOP Austion radio (91.7FM), WZRD Chicago radio (88.3FM), and WLS (8900AM - the largest talk new radio station in Chicago, where at one point she even had a ~10 minute interview and discussion live on the air about her literary magazine "Children, Churches and Daddies"), the internet radio stations including the weekly JohnMac Radio Show, ArtistFirst dot com, chicagopoetry.com's Poetry World Radio and Scars Internet Radio (SIR), and was even shortly on Chicago's Q101 FM radio. She has also appeared on television for poetry in Nashville (in 1997), Chicago (in 1997), and northern Illinois (in a few appearances on the show for the Lake County Poets Society in 2006). Kuypers was also interviewed on her art work on Urbana's CBS / WCIA channel 3 10 o'clock news, and in 2019 was featured in a half-hour show Texas Nafas Poetry, before she started hosting episodes of this monthly tv show.

She turned her writing into performance art on her own and with musical groups like Pointless Orchestra, 5D/5D, The DMJ Art Connection, Order From Chaos, Peter Bartels, Jake and Haystack, the Bastard Trio, and the JoAnne Pow!ers Trio, and starting in 2005 Kuyper...