Janine Joseph

author of “Driving without a License”

February 9, 2018

Janine Joseph was born and raised in the Philippines and Southern California. She is the author of “Driving without a License” (Alice James Books, 2016), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize and a finalist for the 2017 Oklahoma Book Award. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in World Literature Today, The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice, Kenyon Review Online, Best New Poets, Best American Experimental Writing, Zócalo Public Square, The Journal, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. Her libretti for the Houston Grand Opera/HGOco include What Wings They Were: The Case of Emeline, “On This Muddy Water”: Voices from the Houston Ship Channel, and From My Mother's Mother.

She holds an MFA from New York University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Houston, where she was a poetry editor for Gulf Coast. Her honors include a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship, an 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, as well as scholarships and fellowships from Kundiman and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

The best way to hide is in plain sight. In this politically-charged and candid debut, we follow the chronicles of an undocumented immigrant speaker from the Philippines over a twenty-year span as she grows up in the foreign and forbidding landscape of America.

“It stands far apart from most first books, and from most books of autobiographical or narrative poetry, for the unpredictable vigor in its rhythmically irregular lines, especially in its depictions of youthful adventures.” – Steph Burt, The Los Angeles Times

“Through her variety of lines, of old and new forms, and of voices adopted and inhabited, Joseph, herself Filipina-American, does justice to the raw emotions around immigration with verve.” – Publishers Weekly

“As she guides us through constant fearfulness...and unimaginable hurt...Joseph blends everyday anxieties with deeper ones, avoiding outright reportage for smarter inflection. The tensions of visiting the immigration lawyer's office, for instance, are seen in the mad drive away. VERDICT: A gifted writer's view on an all-American issue.” – Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

“Brilliantly crafted and intimate, Driving without a License complicates the narrative of American immigration, creating from it a poetry of beauty and empathy.” – Kevin Prufer

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2018-honorees/janine-joseph

Last Updated: 10 February 2018