Janine Canan is the author of 13 books of poetry, most recently In the Palace of Creation: Selected Works 1969-1999. Her collections, Changing Woman and Star in My forehead: Selected Poems by Else Lasker-Schüler (translations) have received commendation from Book Sense, City Lights Books and Small Press Review. Her writing appears in Awakened Woman, Exquisite Corpse, Kalliope and Wemoon; and in dozens of anthologies including Birnbaum's She Is Everywhere, Codrescu's American Poets Say Goodbye to the 20th Century, Cotner's Pocket Prayers, Harvey's The Divine Feminine, Muten's Her Words, Laughlin's New Directions, Ford-Gabrovsky's Womanprayers, and Macmillan's Women Poets of the World .

Canan edited Messages from Amma: In the Language of the Heart (“Best Spiritual Books 2004”); The Rhyme of the Ag-ed Mariness: Last Poems of Lynn Lonidier; and the award-winning anthology, She Rises like the Sun: Invocations of the Goddess by Contemporary American Women Poets. Her stories, Journeys with Justine, illustrated by Cristina Biaggi, and her essays, Goddesses, Goddesses, will be published in 2007.

Janine has taught poetry, and has given many poetry readings in milieu such as the City University of New York, National Poetry Week of San Francisco, Rutgers University, Shakespeare & Co. Paris, the Smithsonian Institute, Stanford University, and the University of California at Berkeley Art Museum, as well as on radio and television.

Born in Los Angeles in 1942, she is a Stanford graduate with distinction, received an MD from NYU School of Medicine in 1976, and is today a practicing psychiatrist in Sonoma, California.