Janine Canan


Janine Canan is an American poet, essayist, story writer, translator, and editor. She is also a practicing psychiatrist in northern California.

Biography

Born Janine Burford on November 2, 1942 in Los Angeles, California, she graduated from Stanford University cum laude in 1963. She married Michael Canan, a law student, and moved to Berkeley where she did graduate study and taught at the University of California.
In her thirties, she attended New York University School of Medicine and completed a psychiatric residency at Herrick and Mt Zion Hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since 1979, Dr. Canan has been active in private psychiatric practice, consulting for various clinics and organizations, and currently volunteers for Amma's Embracing the World charities.
Her first book of poems, Of Your Seed, appeared in 1977 through a National Endowment for the Arts grant to Oyez Press. Since that time, Canan has authored many books of poetry, translations, anthologies, essays and stories.
In 1989 her acclaimed anthology, She Rises like the Sun: Invocations of the Goddess by Contemporary American Women Poets, illustrated by Mayumi Oda, considered "one of the best books from the women's spirituality movement" by Booklist and widely used in Women's Studies, received the 1990 Koppelman Award. In 2004, her selected teachings of the Indian humanitarian Mata Amritanandamayi, Messages from Amma: In the Language of the Heart, was named "A Best Spiritual Book" and Kiriyami Prize nominee.
Canan's translations of the German Jewish poet Else Lasker-Schüler, Star in My Forehead, was a Booksense and City Lights Books "pick", and a basis for songs by American composer Richard Pearson Thomas. Similarly, her translation of early 20th century French poet of the Pyrenees Francis Jammes, Under the Azure, prefaced by Jammes' granddaughter, inspired songs by Australian singer Kavisha.
The most recent collections of Canan's own poetry are Mystic Bliss, available in German translation by Peter K. Geiger as Mysticsches Glück, Ardor: Poems of Life, Changing Woman, a Small Press Review "pick" with award-winning poems, and In the Palace of Creation: Selected Works 1969—1999, illustrated by Meagan Shapiro. A translation of her poems into Spanish is forthcoming from the Colombian poet Manuel Cortés-Castañeda.
Canan also published a collection of short stories, Journeys with Justine, featured in Longstoryshort, illustrated by Cristina Biaggi, in 2007, along with a first collection of essays, Goddesses, Goddesses, followed by a second collection in 2015, My Millennium: Culture, Spirituality, and the Divine Feminine, illustrated by Cristina Biaggi. Her version of the Navajo Creation Goddess myth, with sand paintings by Ernest Posey, Walk Now in Beauty: The Legend of Changing Woman, published in a tri-lingual English-Spanish-Japanese edition in 2010, is read in the Navajo Literacy Project.
Canan's writing has appeared in hundreds of anthologies and journals including the San Francisco Chronicle, California Quarterly, New Directions, Exquisite Corpse, Women's Review of Books, WeMoon, Femspec, Tower Journal, Israel Horizons, Journal of Archaeomythology and the Journal of Hindu Studies. She was former poetry editor for Awakened Woman and served on the editorial board of . She has given countless readings, and occasional workshops, throughout the United States from Stanford to the Smithsonian, in France and Greece, on radio and television. Her works have been translated into Spanish, Italian, French, German and Japanese.
Janine Canan's papers are housed in the University of Iowa's Special Collections, and her books in the University of California at Berkeley Bancroft Library.

Chronological Publications List