Janine Joseph

Janine Joseph is an associate professor and was the 2022-2023 Dean’s Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Virginia Tech.

Joseph is a poet and librettist born in the Philippines. She is the author of Decade of the Brain: Poems and Driving Without a License, winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, and is co-editor of anthology of poetry and poetics forthcoming from Harper Collins/Harper Perennial. Driving without a License was reviewed in Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, American Microreviews and Interviews, Kenyon Review, and Rain Taxi, and was featured in an extended profile by poet and critic Stephanie Burt for The Los Angeles Times. Her poetry, essays, and critical writings have appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, The Atlantic, Poetry Northwest, Orion, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and the Smithsonian’s “What It Means to Be American” project. Her commissioned work for the Houston Grand Opera/HGOco and Washington Master Chorale includes The Art of Our Healers, What Wings They Were, “On This Muddy Water”: Voices from the Houston Ship Channel, and From My Mother's Mother. Her poems have also been set to music by the acclaimed composers Melissa Dunphy (“American DREAMers: Stories of Immigration”) and Reinaldo Moya (“DREAM Song”). A MacDowell fellow, Joseph serves on the advisory board for the Center of Poets and Writers at OSU-Tulsa and is a co-organizer for Undocupoets, a nonprofit literary organization that advocates for poets who are currently or who were formerly undocumented in the U.S.