Joan Naviyuk Kane – författare

Creative visions of Arctic geography from Indigenous perspectives_x000D__x000D_Grounded in the spatiality of Indigenous existence, Circumpolar Connections: Creative Indigenous Geographies of the Arctic is an innovatively foundational book about experiences and conceptions of geography in the circumpolar world. The book centers Arctic writers and artists as creators of space and disseminators of geographical knowledge emerging from Indigenous epistemologies. It collects newly commissioned poems, short stories, and essays that are accompanied by responses in the form of visual art – including paintings, photographs, and mixed media artworks – as well as brief academic reflections. Containing multiple languages - from English and Russian to North Sámi, Kalaallisut, and Sakha – as well as translations, the book is grounded in dialogues and conversations between creative practitioners from across the circumpolar North. Among others, they include Alutiiq, Eyak, Gwich'in, Innu, Inupiaq, Inuvialuk, Lingit, and Yup'ik writers and visual artists, alongside Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars. Extending "geo-" beyond earth and "-graphy" beyond writing, the creative geographies of Circumpolar Connections powerfully expand the Arctic into manifold spaces imagined by a multiplicity of Indigenous stories and aesthetic forms. In doing so, they offer circumpolar conversations that speak to Arctic communities while reaching out to global audiences._x000D__x000D_[Sample Text]_x000D__x000D_English language assimilation as a bite of sashimi_x000D__x000D_it is like I am eating my own tongue_x000D_cut precisely, a flesh triangle_x000D_cool red bloodless_x000D_and placed in my mouth_x000D_I cannot speak_x000D_it tastes like my own tongue_x000D_salt and flesh_x000D_I am eating my own tongue_x000D_the weight of it

Winner of the 2012 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry Selected by Arthur SzeHyperboreal originates from diasporas. It attempts to make sense of change and to prepare for cultural, climate, and political turns that are sure to continue. The poems originate from the hope that our lives may be enriched by the expression of and reflection on the cultural strengths inherent to indigenous culture. It concerns King Island, the ancestral home of the author's family until the federal government's Bureau of Indian Affairs forcibly and permanently relocated its residents. The poems work towards the assembly of an identity, both collective and singular, that is capable of looking forward from the recollection and impact of an entire community's relocation to distant and arbitrary urban centers. Through language, Hyperboreal grants forum to issues of displacement, lack of access to traditional lands and resources and loss of family that King Island people—and all Inuit—are contending with.

Milk Black Carbon works against the narratives of dispossession and survival that mark the contemporary experience of many indigenous people, and Inuit in particular. In this collection, autobiographical details – motherhood, marriage, extended family and its geographical context in the rapidly changing arctic – negotiate arbitrary landscapes of our perplexing frontiers through fragmentation and interpretation of conventional lyric expectations.

Finalist, 2023 Kingsley Tufts Poetry AwardDark Traffic creates landmarks through language, by which its speakers begin to describe traumas in order to survive and move through them. With fine detail and observation, these poems work in some way like poetic weirs: readers of Kane’s work will see the arctic and subarctic, but also, more broadly, America, and the exigencies of motherhood, indigenous experience, feminism, and climate crises alongside the near-necropastoral of misogyny, violence, and systemic failures. These contexts catch the voice of the poems’ speakers, and we perceive the currents they create.

Included in LitHub’s Most Anticipated Poetry of 2026Ms. Magazine Best Poetry of 2025 and 2026The poems in with snow pouring southward past the window turn with and for relatives and beloveds across seas and oceans, continents and nations, languages and histories. In this collection, public and personal archives work with literary translations across several dialects of the Inupiaq language, and re-complexify Arctics at a time when empires once again seem interested in flattening and erasing millennia of Indigenous inhabitation, care, and situatedness. It was written between Massachusetts, Inuit Nunaat, Sápmi, the “Old World” and through waves of overlapping pandemics, political and social exigencies, and solidarities.

Each year, the best books of poetry published in English internationally and in Canada are honoured with the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious and richest literary awards. Since 2001 this annual prize has tremendously spurred interest in and recognition of poetry, focusing worldwide attention on the formidable talent of poets writing in English and works in translation. Each year The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology features the work of the extraordinary poets shortlisted for the awards and introduces us to some of the finest poems in their collections.Royalties generated from The 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology will be donated to UNESCO’s World Poetry Day, which was created to support linguistic diversity through poetic expression and to offer endangered languages the opportunity to be heard in their communities.Shortlist announced: April 11, 2017Readings: June 7, 2017Prizes awarded: June 8, 2017