Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak and Qawiaraq. She is author of several collections of poetry and prose, including The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife (2009), Hyperboreal (2013), Milk Black Carbon (2017), and Dark Traffic (2021) as well as The Straits (2015), A Few Lines in the Manifest (2018), Sublingual (2018), Another Bright Departure (2019), and Ex Machina (2023). She has recently co-edited Circumpolar Connections: Creative Indigenous Geographies of the Arctic (2024) and Colonialism & the Environment: Pasts, Presents, and Futures (2025), and edited the Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology (2017). 

Kane is currently a Fulbright Specialist and 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, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, and the Paul Engle Prize from Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature. At Scripps College, she was the 2021 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Creative Writing and Journalism. Having held faculty appointments at Harvard University, Tufts University, and elsewhere, Kane has raised her children as a single mother in Alaska and Massachusetts, but now lives with them in Oregon, where she is an Associate Professor at Reed College.