Janine Canan is an American story writer, translator, editor and psychiatrist. Her writing has appeared in hundreds of anthologies and journals including the San Francisco Chronicle, California Quarterly, New Directions and others. She was former poetry editor for Awakened Woman and served on the editorial board of Ochre: Journal of Women's Spirituality.
Background
Janine Burford was born on November 2, 1942, in Los Angeles, California, United States, daughter of Lewis Marion (a restaurateur and entrepreneur) and Mary Athene (Clay) Burford.
Her father was the son of Flora Agnes Cox (1887-1973) and John Exum Cox (18491926), his family had emigrated from the British Isles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to Pennsylvania and then North Carolina, where they settled as plantation farmers in Dobbs (then called Wayne) County.
Her mother, Mary Alene Clay, was bom in Los Angeles in 1920, third-generation Californian.
Education
At six Janine entered first grade at Forty-Second-Street Elementary School. At thirteen she entered Audubon Junior High School, and wrote her first poetic stanza, a pulsing pubescent love call.
She studied at Stanford University and graduated from it with distinction in three years. Then, Janine was the student of University of California, Berkeley; New York School of Medicine; University of California, San Francisco.
Janine was a courtesy staff psychiatrist at Herrick Hospital, Berkeley, 1979-1988. She continued private practice psychiatry in Berkeley in the period of 1979-1992, in Port Townsend, Washington, 1994-1998, Sonoma, California, since 1998.
From 1979 she was a psychiatric consultant at Berkeley Women's Center, Russell House Low-Fee Clinic, Berkeley, 1980-1988. She worked at Faculty consultant University California, Berkeley for one year and was a founder, director of Center Integration in Port Townsend. In 1994 she was appointed to the post of psychiatrist at Washington State Department Social & Health Services in Port Angeles.
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.
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. 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.
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.
Quotations:
''To be a poet is a calling, a gift, a devotion, a duty, and, finally, a mystery. I feel graced and grateful to be a woman and a poet, to have known the intimacies of both poetry and psychiatry. And I am thankful for all the many teachers along the way. My life feels like a rich and intricate weave of abundance and beauty, incessant change and transformation. In masculine and materialistic America - fascinated with the slick, the empty and the deadly - the image of the poet is often confused with the soul of poetry. My own somewhat mystical work - focused on the feminine, in love with the feminine, insistent on the feminine - is perhaps an anomaly.''
Membership
Janine Canan is a member of National Organization of Women, Mata Amritanandamaju Center.
Interests
music
Connections
Janine Canan married Michael Canan, later, they divorced.
Janine received Susan Koppelman Award for best-edited feminist work in 1990, for She Rises Like the Sun: Invocations of the Goddess by Contemporary American Women Poets.
Janine received Susan Koppelman Award for best-edited feminist work in 1990, for She Rises Like the Sun: Invocations of the Goddess by Contemporary American Women Poets.