Janine Joseph

Janine Joseph is a poet and librettist from the Philippines. She is the author of Decade of the Brain: Poems (Alice James Books, 2023), winner of the 2024 Virginia Literary Award for Poetry, and Driving without a License (Alice James Books, 2016), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize and finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award. She is also co-editor of Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora (HarperCollins/Harper Perennial, 2024), which was awarded a Bronze Medal for Best Poetry Anthology by the 2025 International Latino Book Awards. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Virginia Tech, where she directs both the MFA in Creative Writing and Undergraduate Creative Writing Programs. Since 2016, she has organized for Undocupoets, a nonprofit literary organization that was featured in In the Spirit of a Dream: 13 Stories of American Immigrants of Color.

Her poems, essays, and critical writing have appeared in numerous publications, including The Washington Post, Newsweek, The Nation, The Atlantic, Orion, Border Lines: Poems of Migration, Poets & Writers, The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice, Poem-a-Day, Prism Reports, and the Smithsonian’s “What It Means to Be American” project. Her commissioned works for Symphony New Hampshire, Washington Master Chorale, and Houston Grand Opera include Extraordinary Motion: Concerto for Electric Harp, The Art of Our Healers, What Wings They Were, ‘On This Muddy Water’: Songs from the Houston Ship Channel, and From My Mother’s Mother.

She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Houston, an MFA from New York University, a B.A. from UC Riverside, and an A.A. from Riverside City College. She is the recipient of fellowships from Bread Loaf, MacDowell, Kundiman, the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, and the OpEd Project, as well as scholarships and residencies from the Academy of American Poets, Sewanee Writers' Conference, Hedgebrook, the Vermont Studio Center, Bethany Arts Community, and the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow.