Janine Certo is the award-winning author of six books, four full-length poetry collections: Becoming Eve (Bordighera Press, forthcoming 2026), O Body of Bliss, winner of the Longleaf Press Book Contest in Poetry (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). Other awards include the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, the Editor’s Choice Award for the Charles Simic Memorial Prize, and finalist citations for the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize, the Sewanee Review Poetry Prize, the Nina Riggs Poetry Award, and many others. Her writing has been supported by The Spencer Foundation and two grants from the Humanities and Arts Research Program (HARP) at Michigan State University.
Certo’s poems appear in The Cincinnati 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 numerous articles and book chapters about how to encourage poetry writing among people of all ages, with essays appearing in Art/Research International, English Education, Journal of Literacy Research, Language Arts, and others.
Janine is an associate professor in the College of Education at Michigan State University who teaches courses in creative writing, educational philosophy, and literacy and language education. She has also taught introduction to poetry writing in the College of Arts and Letters. Her interests include the poetics of taste, the poetics of the body, ecopoetics, and Bachelard’s philosophies of imagination. She is an assistant poetry editor at Italian Americana and pursuing level two sommelier certification through the National Wine School. She lives in East Lansing, Michigan.
