Janet Newman lives at Koputaroa in Horowhenua. Her poetry, short stories, reviews and essays have been published in New Zealand and Australia. In 2019 she completed a creative writing PhD at Massey University with her thesis "Imagining Ecologies: Traditions of Ecopoetry in Aotearoa" which includes a collection of original ecopoems. 

Her poetry collection Unseasoned campaigner  (Otago University Press, 2021) won the 2022 Heritage Poetry Book Award.  Its manuscript was a runner-up in the 2019 Kathleen Grattan Award. Unseasoned campaigner  includes seven poems from Tender,  winner of the 2017 IWW Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems, and "Biking to the Manawatu River," winner of the 2015 New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition.

Her review, "Gathering Places: Dinah Hawken and Airini Beautrais," was published in Sydney Review of Books in November 2019. Her essays "Listening Harder: Reticulating Poetic Tradition in Michele Leggott's 'Blue Irises'" and "Thinking Like  Leaf: Dinah Hawken, Romantic Ecopoet" won the 2014 and 2016 Journal of New Zealand Literature Prize for New Zealand Literary Studies and are published in the journal.

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