Janine Certo is the author of five books, four full-length poetry collections: Becoming Eve (Bordighera Press, 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); as well as a book of scholarship, Children Writing Poems: Poetic Voices in and out of School (Routledge, 2018). She is also author of Home Altar, winner of the Keystone Chapbook Prize (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023).
Other awards include the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and the Editor’s Choice Award for Hole in the Head Review’s Charles Simic Memorial Prize. Her writing has been supported by grants and fellowships from The Spencer Foundation, the Humanities and Arts Research Program (HARP) at Michigan State University, and The Virginia Center for Creative Arts.
Janine’s poems appear in The Cincinnati Review, The Greensboro Review, New Ohio Review, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, and others. She has also written about how to teach poetry writing in schools and universities, with articles appearing in English Education, Journal of Literacy Research, Language Arts, and others. Her first one-act play, The Paris Effect, is forthcoming in Broadkill Review.
Certo 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 Bachelard’s philosophies of imagination, the poetics of the body, ecopoetics, and the poetics of taste. She is an assistant poetry editor at Italian Americana and holds a Level Two Sommelier certification through the National Wine School. She lives in East Lansing, Michigan.
