Joan Naviyuk Kane

Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak and Qawiaraq. She is author of several collections of poetry and prose, including The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife (2009), Hyperboreal (2013), Milk Black Carbon (2017), and Dark Traffic (2021).  Forthcoming in 2024 is a co-edited anthology, Circumpolar Connections: Creative Indigenous Geographies of the Arctic and in 2025, her collected essays. Kane also co-edited the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology. Kane has been the recipient of numerous honors, among them the Whiting Writer’s Award, the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, the National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, the American Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, the Paul Engle Prize from Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature and is currently a Fulbright Specialist. At Scripps College, she was the 2021 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Creative Writing and Journalism. Having held faculty appointments at Harvard University, Tufts University and elsewhere, Kane has raised her children as a single mother in Alaska and Massachusetts, but now lives with them in Oregon, where she is an Associate Professor at Reed College.