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 children in Cambridge, and has recently taught creative nonfiction and poetry in the department of English at Harvard University, poetry and creative nonfiction 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 has also served as a lecturer in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora at Tufts University, where she taught courses in Native American and Indigenous Studies. At Scripps College, she was the 2021 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Creative Writing and Journalism, and currently serves as visiting poet and visiting assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

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, The Hopkins Review 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. 

Website: thejoankane.com

Twitter Username: @naviyuk

Publications

• The Cormorant Hunter's Wife , NorthShore Press Alaska (September 29, 2009)
• The Straits , The Center for the Study of Place (October 2015)
• Hyperboreal , The University of Pittsburgh Press (October 21, 2013)
• Milk Black Carbon , The University of Pittsburgh Press (January 2017)
• The Straits , Center for the Study of Place (October 6, 2015)
• A Few Lines in the Manifest , Albion (May 16, 2018)
• Sublingual , Finishing Line Press (November 2, 2018)
• Another Bright Departure , CutBank (March 27, 2019)
• Dark Traffic , The University of Pittsburgh Press (September 14, 2021)
• Hyperboreal trs. Lambert Savigneux , Éditions Caractères (November 2, 2022)

Awards

• Guggenheim Fellowship(2018)
• Whiting Writers' Award(2009)
• Native Arts and Cultures National Artist Fellowship(2012)
• USA Creative Vision Award(2013)
• SAR Indigenous Artist in Residence Fellow(2013)
• John Haines Award(2006)
• National Native Creative Development Grant(2009)
• Connie Boochever Fellowship(2009)
• Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Award(2007)
• American Book Award(2014)
• Donald Hall Prize(2011)

Employment

• faculty at Institute of American Indian Arts (January 2014 - )
• Visiting Assistant Professor & visiting poet at University of Massachusetts Boston (September 2022 - )
• visiting lecturer on English at Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences (July 2020 - July 2022)
• lecturer at Tufts University department of studies on Race, Colonialism and Diaspora (primary appointment) & department of English (secondary appointment) (February 2020 - August 2022)
• Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Journalism and Creative Writing at Scripps College (January 2021 - July 2021)

Degrees

• Bachelor of Arts in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard College (June 2000)
• Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Columbia University School of the Arts (May 2006)

Genres of Interest

Fiction, Creative nonfiction, Playwriting, Poetry