Celebrated Poet and Librettist Janine Joseph Featured in The Life of a Poet Series

Photo of Janine Joseph and her family.

The Life of a Poet is a quarterly series of conversations that Hill Center launched in 2013. The series offers a rare opportunity to consider a writer’s entire career and explore the major events that have shaped their work. Featured poets have included Poet Laureate, Ada Limón, Elizabeth Alexander, Terrance Hayes, Adrian Matejka and Marilyn Chin, among many others. Accomplished poet and editor, Kyle Dargan, curates the series and expertly moderates each conversation. On Thursday, January 23^rd, celebrated poet and librettist Janine Joseph is our guest. 

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.

“I immigrated in September of 1991 at the age of eight. My father arrived with my brothers a few months before me and my mother a month after me, so when people ask me when my family arrived I always reframe it to when I arrived. I didn’t know it at the time, but the colorful California sunsets I witnessed upon my arrival were caused by the June 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines. How wonderful to know now that there was evidence of my homeland all around me for many months after!

I was born into the Marcos dictatorship and my family played a role in the 1986 People Power Revolution, so when we left the country in 1991 my father was working for Cory Aquino, who was president of the Philippines from 1986-1992). The National Geographic ran a story on the PPR and if you look through the photo slideshow you will be able to see my dad (wearing a hat and “Cory is my president” shirt), as well as two of my uncles in the protest line. My current book project focuses on much of this history, as well as the years immediately after my family’s arrival to the US. After 32 years, I was finally able to return to the Philippines at the start of 2024.”

Kyle Dargan writes, “I am often consumed with identifying the urgency, or urgencies, in contemporary American poetry, and I think the work of immigrants is indispensable in this moment when the genuinely complex issue of immigration is being reduced to ill-fitting either/or discourses. So Janine Joseph’s vulnerable yet resolute writing and perspective are elements I wanted to bring back to D.C. This new iteration of the series has a pointed focus on illuminating the way poets in particular think and conceptualize, and I am very interested in how Jospeh’s past and current work can contextualize the era we are on the cusp of. “

We are looking forward to welcoming both Janine and Kyle to Hill Center January 23^rd at 7pm.