In person > Zoom. Exhibit A: Janine Joseph.

Unbound’s virtual festival in 2021 was amazing in many ways. We had more events, more writers, and more than 50,000 people tuned in over the course of the three months to watch an event. But as rewarding and fun as it all was, it wasn’t the same as gathering in person - something we were reminded of, joyously, when we got together in 2022.

We’re very pleased, then, to welcome poet Janine Joseph back to Unbound, after her first appearance during the online fest. She was wonderful then, but will, we know, be even wonderfuller in person.

Janine Joseph is a poet and librettist from the Philippines. She is the author of Decade of the Brain: Poems (Alice James Books, 2023) and Driving Without a License (2016), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in The Nation, The Atlantic, The Georgia Review, Orion, Poets & Writers, Poem-a-Day, and the Smithsonian’s “What It Means to Be American” project. She is also co-editing Undocupoetics: An Introduction, forthcoming from Harper Collins/Harper Perennial. 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. A co-organizer for Undocupoets and MacDowell Fellow, she is associate professor of creative writing at Oklahoma State University and the inaugural Dean’s Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Virginia Tech. Learn more at www.janinejoseph.com.