Melanie Janisse-Barlow

Melanie Janisse-Barlow is a poet and artist. Her first collection of poetry, Orioles in the Oranges (Guernica, 2009), was listed for the Relit Award. Janisse-Barlow is known for her suites of personal micro essays, which include Detroit (Bayou, 2013) listed in Best American essays for that year. Over the past eight years, she has published poems, reviews and essays in a variety of journals and anthologies across Canada and the US. Thicket, her second full length poetry collection is forthcoming with Palimpsest Press on editor Jim Johnstone’s Anstruther Imprint. Janisse-Barlow’s works as a visual artist include the Poets Series Project (www.poets-series-project.com) —a popular portraiture project that includes over one hundred likenesses, including portraits of Hoa Nguyen, John Sinclair, Ken Mikolowski and Anna Vitale. The Poets Series Project was recently featured in Taddle Creek Magazine (January 2017) and Poets and Writers (December 2017). She lives between her home in Windsor, Ontario and her wooden boat Kalinka in Toronto, Ontario. Kalinka is the subject of a new memoir, currently underway. Excerpts from Kalinka were recently featured on the Canadian lifestyle online publication She Does the City, serialized from November-January 2017/18.