joan naviyuk kane

Joan Naviyuk Kane is the author of poetry and prose collections including The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife (2009), Hyperboreal (2013), The Straits (2015), Milk Black Carbon (2017) and, A Few Lines in the Manifest (2018). Forthcoming in 2018 is Sublingual (November). Works in progress include Dark Traffic, Another Bright Departure, and A Field Guide to Contemporary Native Poetics. Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from King Island (Ugiuvak) and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska. She was raised in and attended public school in Anchorage, where she currently raises her sons as a single mother. Kane graduated with honors from Harvard College, where she was a Harvard National Scholar, and Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where she was the recipient of a graduate Writing Fellowship.

She has received the John Haines Award (2004), Rasmuson Foundation Individual Awards (2007, 2016), the Whiting Writer’s Award (2009), the Connie Boochever Fellowship from the Alaska Arts and Cultures Foundation (2009), a National Native Creative Development Program Award from the Longhouse Education and Cultural Center (2009), the Anchorage Museum Theatre Script Contest (2009), and was a finalist for the 2009 Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Fellowship. Kane received the 2013 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship, the 2013 United States Artists Foundation Creative Vision Award, the 2013 Rasmuson Foundation Artist Fellowship, the 2014 Alaska Literary Award, and the 2016 Aninstantia Foundation Fellowship. In 2014, she was indigenous writer-in-residence at the School For Advanced Research, was Tuttle Creative Residency Fellow at Haverford College and a Fellow at the Hermitage Artist Retreat in 2016, and, in 2017, was a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellow and a judge for the awards of the Griffin Poetry Prize. She was appointed as the first Native recipient of a Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry in 2018.

Her poems have been anthologized widely, including Best American Poetry, Hick Poetics, Read America(s), Syncretism & Survival: A Forum on Poetics, Monticello in Mind, and elsewhere, and new poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in amberflora, Alaska Quarterly Review, Pinwheel, Arkansas International, and Boston Review. Her essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Sustenance: Writers from BC and Beyond on the Subject of Food, The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice, and 21|19: Readings in Proximity. Kane will focus her Guggenheim Fellowship year on research and writing related to the role Alaska assumed in national and world dynamics during the Cold War era, and will write toward a contemporary Inupiaq understanding of the historical prominence of the arctic in geopolitical terms, which shall be subsumed or re-contextualized in her creative work. She taught in the low-residency MFA program in writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, beginning in January 2014. Immediately prior to joining the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the Institute of Amerian Indian Arts in its first year, she was part of the management team of Sitnasuak Native Corporation. Rather improbably, having been admitted to St. Vincent Christus in Santa Fe on May 10, 2018 and placed on a-not-to-be-overlooked intravenous dose of methylprednisolone some days prior to the Gold Nugget Triathlon to treat nonspecific tachycardia and a severe and acute allergic reaction to gadobutrol she'd had injected intravenously contemporaneous with like her 57th time being slipped into a clicking and droning MRI machine in Anchorage on May 4, 2018 &c (long story, but there was at least one pelvis involved), she set a PR in her most recent triathlon. You can check out her times and video footage of her leisurely T2 transition and rather non-dilly-dallying finish on the internet. You can also buy some of her books around, but mostly you should support Albion Books and snap up a copy of her real prose debut (well, I mean, long and complex story there, too) before too much time passes, because all proceeds from the sale of the remaining hundred or so copies of A Few Lines in the Manifest support the work of Albion Books and she, among others in her troublingly physical vicinity) won't see a single cent. And Brian Teare really does some kickass work. #kaneout