Inupiaq poet Joan Naviyuk Kane grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, with family from King Island and Mary's Igloo, Alaska. She earned a BA at Harvard University and an MFA at Columbia University.
Kane is the author of the poetry collections Hyperboreal (2013), which Arthur Sze chose for the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, The Cormorant Hunter's Wife (2009) and Milk Black Carbon (2017.) Her honors include a Whiting Writers' Award and a Creative Vision Award from United States Artists as well as fellowships and residencies from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, the Rasmuson Foundation, the Alaska State Council on the Arts, and the School for Advanced Research. She lives in Anchorage.
"Milk Black Carbon is at once a brilliant work of lyric art and a decoding of knowledges written 'in the dark cursive of a wolf/circling on sea ice.' Kane's is a vertiginous sensibility, chiseled into language in a precarious time, as the rising seas 'rephrase us.' She writes in English and Inupiaq Eskimo, toward a horizon of radical futurity, against nostalgia, with awareness that there is no turning back. This is a twenty-first century poetry, urgent, necessary, and of its time."- Carolyn Forché
"The black ink of a strong, strong hand. A rare and real word-world, mind-muscled into serious relief, stopped into dream and meaning."- Olena Kalytiak Davis