Joan Kane

Poet

Cambridge, MA
Massachusetts US

Author's Bio

Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from King Island (Ugiuvak) and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska. She is the author of several collections of poetry and prose, including Dark Traffic, which is forthcoming in the 2021 Pitt Poetry Series. She currently teaches poetry and creative nonfiction in the Department of English at Harvard University, is a lecturer in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora at Tufts University, and was founding faculty of the graduate creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She received a 2009 Whiting Writer’s Award for The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, and the 2012 Donald Hall prize for Hyperboreal. She was a 2013 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellow, the Indigenous Writer in Residence at the School for Advanced Research in 2014, a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, and the 2019-2020 Hilles Bush Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is a 2020-2021 Visiting Fellow of Race and Ethnicity at The Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University.

Publications & Prizes

Books:
Milk Black Carbon (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017)
,
Hyperboreal (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013)
,
The Cormorant Hunter's Wife (University of Alaska Press, 2009)
Prizes won: 

Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from King Island (Ugiuvak) and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska. She is the author of several collections of poetry and prose, including Dark Traffic, which is forthcoming in the 2021 Pitt Poetry Series. She currently teaches poetry and creative nonfiction in the Department of English at Harvard University, is a lecturer in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora at Tufts University, and was founding faculty of the graduate creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She received a 2009 Whiting Writer’s Award for The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, and the 2012 Donald Hall prize for Hyperboreal. She was a 2013 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellow, the Indigenous Writer in Residence at the School for Advanced Research in 2014, a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, and the 2019-2020 Hilles Bush Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is a 2020-2021 Visiting Fellow of Race and Ethnicity at The Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University.

Personal Favorites

What I'm reading now: 
The Gangster We Are All Looking For by Thi Diem Thuy Le, The Accordionist's Son by Bernard Atxaga

More Information

Gives readings: 
Yes
Travels for readings: 
Yes
Identifies as: 
Native American
Prefers to work with: 
Any
Fluent in: 
English
Born in: 
Anchorage
Raised in: 
AK
Alaska
Please note: All information in the Directory is provided by the listed writers or their representatives.
Last update: Dec 02, 2020