[5] Her poetry and prose have been featured in anthologies including Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order, The Best American Erotic Poems From 1800 to the Present, and Verses that Hurt.
She lives in her native New York City with her domestic partner, Bill Scurry,[6] and produces an instructional web series called Advice for Young Writers.
[7] As chronicled in her memoir Girlbomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir, after running away from home at age 15 Erlbaum spent years going from youth shelter to shelter, a self-described "halfway homeless" high school student afflicted with a taste for hard drugs and risky choices, while attending Bayard Rustin High School for the Humanities.
[8] Published for the first time at the age of 20 in New York Press, where she was a frequent contributor of personal essays and short features from 1991 through 1995, Janice Erlbaum was a prominent fixture on the early ‘90s New York slam poetry scene, performing as a member of the feminist collective Pussy Poets, and earning a spot on MTV’s “Sex in the ‘90s: Love Sucks” special, as well as the cover of the Nuyorican anthology.
[10] Her second memoir, Have You Found Her, was published by Villard/Random House in 2008; it details her return to the shelter as an adult volunteer, and the deep relationship she forged with a brilliant, damaged girl she called “Samantha.”[11] She has also contributed, in recent years, to McSweeneys.org, Nerve.com, and Nextbook.