Poet and prose writer Joan Naviyuk Kane was raised in Anchorage, Alaska. She is a member of the Inupiaq people, with family from King Island (Ugiuvak) and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska. She received a BA with honors from Harvard University and earned her MFA from Columbia University. Kane’s seven books and chapbooks include Hyperboreal (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), winner of the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry and the American Book Award. Her most recent collection is Another Bright Departure (CutBank Books, 2019).
Kane is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a Hilles Bush Fellowship, among other honors. In 2014, she was named the Indigenous Writer-in-Residence at the School for Advanced Research, and in 2017, she judged the Griffin Poetry Prize Awards. She has been a finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and the Dorset Prize. Kane was founding faculty at the graduate creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where she currently teaches in the low-residency MFA program. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.