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). Winner of Nimrod International Journal’s Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, her poems appear in The Cincinnati Review, The 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 2022.
Certo has additionally written about how to encourage poetry writing among people of all ages, with scholarly articles appearing in Art/Research International, English Education, Journal of Literacy Research, Language Arts, and others. She has received grant awards from The Spencer Foundation and Michigan State University’s Humanities and Arts Research Program.
Janine is an associate professor at Michigan State University who teaches in the College of Education and the College of Arts and Letters. An assistant poetry editor at Italian Americana, her interests have focused on food narratives of the Italian diaspora, late 20th- and 21st-century poetry, the poetics of space, and the poetics of the body. She is at work on her fourth full-length poetry collection. She lives in East Lansing, Michigan.
