Janine Joseph

Janine Joseph is a formerly undocumented poet and librettist from the Philippines. She is the author of Decade of the Brain, forthcoming in January 2023 from Alice James Books, and Driving Without a License (2016), winner Kundiman Poetry Prize. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University and the inaugural Dean’s Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Virginia Tech.

She is an organizer for Undocupoets, a nonprofit literary organization that advocates for poets who are currently or who were formerly undocumented. In 2021, Undocupoets was featured in the children’s book, In the Spirit of a Dream: 13 Stories of American Immigrants of Color.

Her poetry, essays, and critical writings have appeared in numerous venues, including The Nation, The Atlantic, The Georgia Review, The Rumpus, Pleiades, World Literature Today, Poets & Writers, Kenyon Review Online, The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice, The Asian American Literary Review, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series, and the Smithsonian’s “What It Means to Be American” project. Her poems have been anthologized in Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Penguin Random House), Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic), Best American Experimental Writing, Best New Poets 2011, Homage to Vallejo, Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California, and Breathe: 101 Contemporary Odes.  

Janine's commissioned chamber operas, song cycles, and choral works include The Art of Our Healers (Washington Master Chorale and Houston Grand Opera), What Wings They Were: The Case of Emeline (HGO/HGOco), "On This Muddy Water": Voices from the Houston Ship Channel (HGO/ HGOco), and From My Mother's Mother (HGO/HGOco). Her poems have also been set to music by the acclaimed composers Melissa Dunphy (“American DREAMers: Stories of Immigration”) and Reinaldo Moya (“DREAM Song”). She is currently working again with composer D. J. Sparr on an electric harp concerto.

Janine earned a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston, an MFA from New York University, a BA from UC Riverside, and an AA from Riverside City College. A Kundiman and MacDowell Fellow, her honors also include a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, a Howard Nemerov Scholarship, an Inprint/ Barthelme Fellowship in Poetry, a Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center Fellowship for Collaboration Among the Arts, a PAWA Manuel G. Flores Prize, an Academy of American Poets prize, as well as residencies from Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, Bethany Arts Community, and The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow.

Her teaching recognitions include a 2020 English Graduate Student Association Outstanding Graduate Faculty Award from Oklahoma State University and a 2013 Robert M. Hogge Faculty Teaching Award from Weber State University. Trained as a teaching artist through the Community-Word Project in NYC, Janine has also taught poetry in the community with Writers in the Schools, the Starworks Fellowship Program, and the Gluck Fellows Program for the Arts. 

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