Biography

Dr. Justin Jannise is the author of How to Be Better by Being Worse (BOA Editions, Ltd.). They grew up in rural southeast Texas. As a first-generation college student, they attended Yale University, where they won the 2009 Albert Stanburrough Cook Prize for Poetry. They worked as a freelance pop culture writer in New York City before moving to Iowa to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The University of Iowa awarded them a Teaching-Writing Fellowship in 2013 and named them the Provost’s Visiting Writer in Poetry in 2014. While earning a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston, Justin served as Editor-in-Chief of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts from 2018 to 2020. They frequently teach workshops for Inprint, Grackle & Grackle, and Writespace. As part of Writers in the Schools, they have led classrooms at Field Elementary School, White Elementary School, Garden Oaks Montessori, the High School for Law and Justice, and M.D. Anderson Cancer Hospital. They are the recipient of both the Inprint Marion Barthelme Prize and the Inprint Verlaine Prize in Poetry. In 2019, their poems appeared in both Best New Poets and Best of the Net, and Copper Nickel nominated “Leather Jacket” for a Pushcart Prize. Their poem “Flamingosexual” won The Pinch Journal’s 2020 Pinch Literary Award. Their writing has also appeared—or is forthcoming—in The Greensboro Review, Hobart, Houston Chronicle, Lana Turner, New Ohio Review, Out, Palette Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The Southeast Review, Split Lip Magazine, and Yale Review.