Janine Kovac is a writer and interdisciplinary artist living in the San Francisco Bay Area. She draws on her experience as a professional ballet dancer to explore the intersection between art and empathy as expressed through the constraints of the physical body. Her memoir Spinning: Choreography for Coming Home was a semifinalist for Publishers Weekly’s BookLife Prize and a winner of the 2019 National Indie Excellence Awards. Janine is an alumna of the Community of Writers, Hedgebrook, and the Mineral School and a recipient of a 2016 Elizabeth George Foundation Fellowship and the 2021 San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Award for Literary Nonfiction.
During her 2021 residency, Kovac finished an outline of her novel-in-progress Proposition, which examines the sex-trafficking epidemic in Oakland from the dual perspective of survivors striving to create a better world for themselves and white-savior activists oblivious to the ways they perpetuate systemic inequality. Proposition was granted fiscal sponsorship in 2022 by Fractured Atlas.
