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 completing two book-length essay collections and a new poetry collection.