JANINE JOSEPH is the author of Driving without a License (Alice James Books, 2016), winner of the 2014 Kundiman Poetry Prize. Driving Without a License is composed of linked poems that follow, over a twenty-year period, an immigrant from the Philippines living in America without proper legal documentation.
Her poems and essays have appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Journal, Zócalo Public Square, The Asian American Literary Review, Waxwing, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. Her poems have been anthologized in Best American Experimental Writing 2015, Best New Poets 2011, Breathe: 101 Contemporary Odes, Homage to Vallejo, and Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California.
Her commissioned libretti for the Houston Grand Opera (HGOco) includes What Wings They Were: The Case of Emeline, “On This Muddy Water”: Voices from the Houston Ship Channel, and From My Mother's Mother.
Janine holds an A.A. from Riverside City College, a B.A. from UC Riverside, an MFA from New York University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Houston, where she was a poetry editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. A Kundiman fellow and contributing editor for Tongue: A Journal of Writing and Art, Janine is also the recipient of 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, a Dissertation Completion Fellowship, and a Robert M. Hogge Teaching Award, among other honors.
She has taught creative writing, literature, and composition at New York University, the University of Houston, and Weber State University, as well as in the community with Writers in the Schools, Community~Word Project, Starworks Foundation, and Gluck Fellows Program for the Arts.
Janine currently lives in Stillwater, OK, where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. She was born in the Philippines.
For more information please visit: http://www.janinejoseph.com/
