Janine Joseph is a formerly undocumented poet and librettist from the Philippines. She is the author of Decade of the Brain, winner of the 2024 Virginia Literary Award for Poetry, and Driving without a License, winner of the 2014 Kundiman Poetry Prize and finalist for the 2017 Oklahoma Book Award. She is also co-editor of the anthology Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora, now available from Harper Perennial. A Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow and Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project, she is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Virginia Tech, where she was previously the inaugural Dean’s Distinguished Visiting Scholar.

Since 2017, Janine has organized for Undocupoets, a nonprofit literary organization that advocates for poets who are currently or who were formerly undocumented in the United States. In 2021, Undocupoets was featured in the children’s book, In the Spirit of a Dream: 13 Stories of American Immigrants of Color. Janine also serves on the Artistic Advisory Panel for Oklahoma Arts Institute at Quartz Mountain.

Her poetry, essays, and critical writings have appeared in numerous venues, including Newsweek, The Nation, The Atlantic, The Georgia Review, Poetry Northwest, 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, Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology, 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 Extraordinary Motion: Concerto for Electric Harp (Symphony New Hampshire), 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”).

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. The 2024 Cherry Tree Young Writers’ Conference Mary Wood Fellow, she has also received fellowships from MacDowell, Bread Loaf, and Kundiman. Her additional honors include a Howard Nemerov Scholarship (Sewanee Writers’ Conference), an Inprint/ Barthelme Fellowship in Poetry, a Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center Fellowship for Collaboration Among the Arts, a PAWA Manuel G. Flores Prize, and 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 taught poetry in public schools, art museums, arboretums, public libraries and parks for Writers in the Schools, the Starworks Fellowship Program, and the Gluck Fellows Program for the Arts.