Janine Puntureri Certo is the author of ELIXIR, winner of both the 2020 New American Poetry Prize judged by Corey Van Landingham and the 2020 Lauria/Frasca Poetry Prize judged by Maria Terrone (forthcoming, co-published by New American Press and Bordighera Press) and IN THE CORNER OF THE LIVING, first runner-up for the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award (Main Street Rag, 2017), as well as the non-fiction book CHILDREN WRITING POEMS: Poetic Voices in and out of School (Routledge, 2018). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Rumpus, The Greensboro Review, Mid-American Review, New Ohio Review, Nimrod, and other publications. Her poems have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and earned second prize in the 2020 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry judged by Kaveh Akbar. Her writing has been supported by grants from The Spencer Foundation and MSU’s Humanities and Arts Research Program. She lives in Michigan where she is an associate professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University.