Jannise grew up in rural southeast Texas. As a first-generation college student, they attended Yale University, where they won the 2009 Albert Stanburrough Cook Prize for Poetry. They worked as a freelance pop culture writer in New York City before attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The University of Iowa awarded Jannise a Teaching-Writing Fellowship in 2013 and named them the Provost’s Visiting Writer in Poetry in 2014. Before completing a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston in 2022, Jannise served a two-year term as Editor-in-Chief of Gulf Coast.