Joan Kane

Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak (King Island) and Qawiaraq (Mary's Igloo), Alaska. Dark Traffic (2021) follows The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife (2009), Hyperboreal (2013), The Straits (2015), Milk Black Carbon (2017), Sublingual (2018), A Few Lines in the Manifest (2018) and Another Bright Departure (2019). Kane has been the recipient of 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, the Alaska Literary Award, the United States Artists Foundation Creative Vision Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, the Mellon Practitioner Fellowship in Race and Ethnicity at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University, multiple Individual Artist awards & Artist Fellowships from the Rasmuson Foundation, and residencies with the School for Advanced Research, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Millay Arts and Harvard's Radcliffe Institute. She raises her sons in Cambridge, and teaches creative nonfiction in the department of English at Harvard University, poetry in the department of English at Tufts University, and creative nonfiction and poetry in the graduate creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is a lecturer in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora at Tufts University, where she teaches courses in Native American and Indigenous Studies. At Scripps College, she is the 2021 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Creative Writing and Journalism.

Her essays, poems, and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, Before the Usual Time, Hick Poetics, Yale Review, Salamander, FLAG + VOID, Thalia, 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, Exquisite Vessel: Shapes of Native Nonfiction, The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice, Syncretism and Survival: A Forum on Poetics, HERE: Poems for the Planet, The Guardian, Orion, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Poetry International, POETRY, Nat. Brut, West Branch, Territory, Drunken Boat, absent, and elsewhere.

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021

CutBank, 2019

Finishing Line Press, 2018

Albion Books, 2018

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017

Voices from the American Land, 2015

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013

NorthShore Press Alaska, 2009 (out of print)

University of Alaska Press, 2012

Purchase Joan Kane's books via IndieBound, amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Voices from the American Land, Pitt Press, University of Alaska Press, or Albion Books.

Updates coming soon. Iliġanamiik and quyaanna for your support and interest in our amazing journey to Ugiuvak.

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I seek through Polar Lab work personal context for the present and future state of the North and the Inupiaq diaspora. 

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The Before Columbus Foundation announces Joan Naviyuk Kane's Hyperboreal as one of the Winners of the Thirty-Fifth Annual American Book Awards.

Joan Naviyuk Kane's Hyperboreal is a finalist for the 2014 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry.
 

The Alaska Arts and Cultures Foundation launches inaugural year of the Alaska Literary Awards.

Kane poem vectorized via third annual translation feature of Broadsided Pres.

Suzanne Smith writes: "What is at stake in 'Hyperboreal' is not only the threat of 'cultural and biological extinction' faced by the Inupiaq people of Alaska, but also the contested place of the human in that landscape and more particularly, the lyric subject. Kane questions its customary property (which is loss) and its dream of deliverance from extinction through craft. . . In this book, we are never far from the prospective end of a line of human beings, if not the extinction of the landscape."

Maggie Millner at ZYZZYVA notes: "Kane’s periodic refusal to translate testifies to the irreducibility of these messages, and to the impossibility of paraphrase from a language suffused with the knowledge of its own endangerment. As Spivak would have it, one cannot make widely legible an experience whose illegibility to dominant culture is among its fundamental experiential features."

"Quiet but never silent, Hyperboreal embodies the landscape it seeks to represent. Through observation and lived experience, these poems are indicative of an ever-watched and yet not always understood world. Here there is existence where humans are only a fragment." More from Alyse Bensel at Los Angeles Review of Books.

"The poems of Joan Naviyuk Kane are lyrical blasts from a far northern landscape of history and myth. From the first lines of her second book, “Hyperboreal,” just published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Ms. Kane transports us." More with Joan Kane and Dana Jennings.

"Hyperboreal accomplishes a great deal: it paints pastorals and impressions of uncapturable experiences with striking concision; it serves as a wire, a satellite transporting the life and culture of the Inupiaq people to the rest of the world (and transplants the rest of the world, for the duration of the book and in readers’ memories of the book, to the world of the Inupiaq people); it offers a confident and impressionistically lasting poetic voice.... More  from Wesley Rothman at American Microreviews