Janine Certo is the author of five books, three full-length poetry collections: O Body of Bliss, winner of the Longleaf Press Book Contest in Poetry (Longleaf Press, 2023), Elixir, winner of both the New American Poetry Prize and the Lauria/Frasca Poetry Prize (New American Press and Bordighera Press, 2021), and In the Corner of the Living, runner-up for the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award (2017); a poetry chapbook, Home Altar, winner of the Keystone Chapbook Prize (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023); and a book of scholarship, Children Writing Poems: Poetic Voices in and out of School (Routledge, 2018).
She was awarded a grant from The Spencer Foundation and two grants from the Humanities and Arts Research Program (HARP) at Michigan State University. Other honors include the 2020 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry judged by Kaveh Akbar and the Editor’s Choice Award for the 2024 Charles Simic Memorial Prize. Poems appear in The Cincinnati Review, Greensboro Review, Mid-American Review, New Ohio Review, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, and others. Her poem Limoncello was featured in Gastronomica, and her poem When I Contemplate My Existence was a finalist for Best of the Net. She has also written about how to encourage poetry writing among people of all ages, with articles appearing in Art/Research International, English Education, Journal of Literacy Research, Language Arts, and others.
Janine is an associate professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University who teaches courses in creative writing, philosophy, and literacy and language education. An assistant poetry editor at Italian Americana, her interests include the teaching of poetry writing, narratives of the Italian diaspora, Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, the poetics of the body, ecopoetics, and the poetics of taste. She lives in East Lansing, Michigan.
