Janine Certo is the 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 and the Editor’s Choice Award for the Charles Simic Memorial Prize. Her writing has been supported by a grant from The Spencer Foundation and two grants from the Humanities and Arts Research Program (HARP) at Michigan State University.
Her poems appear in The Cincinnati Review, Gastronomica, Mid-American Review, New Ohio Review, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, and others. 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, and Language Arts.
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 at work on Sommelier Level Two certification through the National Wine School. She lives in East Lansing, Michigan.
