Joan Naviyuk Kane
Associate Professor of Creative Writing
Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak (King Island) and Qawiaraq (Mary's Igloo), Alaska. Prior to her 2023 chapbook Ex Machina, Kane’s most recent book, Dark Traffic, was a finalist for the 2023 Kingsley Tufts Award. Her other poetry and essay collections include The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, Hyperboreal, The Straits, Milk Black Carbon, Sublingual, A Few Lines in the Manifest and Another Bright Departure. A graduate of Harvard College, she received her MFA from Columbia University. Recognitions for her work include a Whiting Writer’s Award, the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship, the American Book Award, the Alaska Literary Award, the United States Artists Foundation Creative Vision Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Hilles Bush Fellowship at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, and a 2020 Mellon Fellowship at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. Kane is an editor, writer, and collaborator for the Finland-based Mediated Arctic Geographies projects, primarily Indigenous Geographies: Circumpolar Connections, an anthology of Arctic Indigenous Art and Cultural Criticism. Her essays, poems, and short stories have been published widely, appearing or forthcoming in Best American Poetry, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, The Hopkins Review, Yale Review, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, More Truly and More Strange: 100 Contemporary American Self-Portrait Poems, 21|19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth Century Archive, Shapes of Native Nonfiction, Orion, Poetry, Territory, Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World, The Norton Reader, and elsewhere. A nonfiction book, Passing Through Danger, is forthcoming in 2024. She has recently taught literature, creative nonfiction and poetry at the University of Massachusetts (Boston), Harvard University, Tufts University, and in the graduate creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico since helping found the program in 2013. She has also served as a lecturer in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora at Tufts University, teaching courses in Native American and Indigenous Studies. At Scripps College, she was the 2021 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Creative Writing and Journalism.