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.

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. She was a featured poet on the Lollapalooza ’94 tour, and performed and hosted at Woodstock 94. Pussy Poets and Erlbaum’s solo act were seen at venues including Dixon Place, the Kitchen, St. Mark's Poetry Project, and Fez.

In 1996, she was hired at noted dot com art factory Pseudo.com (subject of the documentary We Live in Public), and rose to the position of Executive Producer before departing in 1999. After Pseudo, she became the Editor-at-Large at POPsmear magazine, then the Managing Editor of Bust magazine, where she’d been a contributor since 1993. Her online news column for BUST.com was one of the first feminist blogs.

In 2006, Villard/Random House published her first book, Girlbomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir. An explicit look back at her teenage years spent in shelters and group homes, Girlbomb was praised in venues including the New York Times and Elle magazine, and awarded several honors, including a spot on the New York Public Library’s “25 to Remember” list for 2006. It was simultaneously published in the UK as The Runaway by Ebury Press, and under its original name by Random House Australia. 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.” She has also contributed, in recent years, to McSweeneys.org, Nerve.com, and Nextbook.

Erlbaum currently teaches memoir writing, and has addressed audiences at colleges, bookstores, coffee houses, and theaters across the US. She serves on the board of Girls Write Now, an organization that pairs at-risk high school girls with writing mentors, and volunteers at GEMS, which helps young women who have been victims of sexual exploitation. She lives in her native New York City with her domestic partner, Bill Scurry.