Joan Naviyuk Kane
Visiting Associate Professor of Creative Writing
English Department
Division of Literature and Languages
Joan Naviyuk Kane received her A.B. in English and American Language and Literature from Harvard University, and her M.F.A. in Writing from Columbia University. Professor Kane is Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak (King Island) and Qawiaraq (Mary’s Igloo). Kane is the author of several collections of poetry and prose: The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, Hyperboreal, The Straits, Milk Black Carbon, Sublingual, A Few Lines in the Manifest, Another Bright Departure, Dark Traffic, and Ex Machina. Dark Traffic was a finalist for the 2023 Kingsley Tufts poetry award. A Guggenheim Fellow, Radcliffe Fellow, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation’s National Artist Fellow, Mellon Practitioner Fellow, and Whiting Award recipient, she’s recently been selected as a 2023-2026 Fulbright Specialist and the recipient of the 2023 Paul Engle Prize from the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature. Forthcoming in 2024 is her edited anthology, Circumpolar Connections: Creative Indigenous Geographies of the Arctic, as well as an essay collection, Passing Through Danger. Her poetry and essays have recently appeared in The Hopkins Review, The Yale Review, The Slowdown, Poetry, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. Prior to her arrival at Reed, she held faculty appointments in the departments of English at Harvard, Tufts, and UMass Boston, and in the graduate creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. 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.