Janine Certo

Biography

Janine Certo is a poet and associate professor in the Department of Teacher Education with interests in contemporary poetry, creative writing pedagogy, poetic inquiry, the poetics of food, and supporting K-12 educators to encourage children’s and adolescents’ poetry writing in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms. She is the author of three books, two full-length poetry collections: Elixir, winner of both the 2020 New American Poetry Prize and the 2020 Lauria/Frasca Poetry Prize (forthcoming 2021, co-published by New American Press and Bordighera Press) and In the Corner of the Living, runner-up for the 2017 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award (Main Street Rag, 2017), as well as a book of language and literacy scholarship, Children Writing Poems: Poetic Voices in and out of School (Routledge, 2018). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in such journals as The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, and Valparaiso Poetry Review, and are additionally featured in Gastronomica and Italian Americana. Her articles are published in Journal of Literacy Research, Art/Research International, Language Arts, and others. She is recipient of second prize in Nimrod International Journal’s 2020 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, as well as grants from The Spencer Foundation and Michigan State University’s Humanities and Arts Research Program.