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).
She was awarded a grant from The Spencer Foundation and two grants from the Humanities and Arts Research Program at Michigan State University. Other honors include the 2020 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry judged by Kaveh Akbar, the Editor’s Choice Award for the 2024 Charles Simic Memorial Prize, and finalist citations for the Cider Press Review Editors’ Book Prize, the Arts & Letters Rumi Poetry Prize, the Sewanee Review Poetry Contest, the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry, the Nina Riggs Poetry Award, and many others.
Certo’s poems appear in The Cincinnati Review, Poetry Northwest, New Ohio Review, Shenandoah, Mid-American Review, 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. She has also 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.
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 has just completed her fourth full-length poetry manuscript. She lives in East Lansing, Michigan.
