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Joan Naviyuk Kane has been named the 12th recipient of the Paul Engle Prize, presented by the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature organization. Kane is Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak (King Island) and Qawiaraq (Mary’s Igloo), Alaska. She is the author of several collections of poetry, including 2017’s Milk Black Carbon, 2021’s Dark Traffic, and the new chapbook, Ex Machina. She is the recipient of several awards, including 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, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has held faculty appointments in the department of English at Harvard University, in the department of English at Tufts University, and in the graduate creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has also served as a lecturer in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora at Tufts University, teaching courses in Native American and Indigenous Studies. She raised her children in Alaska and Massachusetts and now lives with them in Oregon, where she is a visiting associate professor at Reed College. Kane was awarded the prize for the breadth of her work as a poet, teacher, and advocate for her own communities and the world at large. In his nomination for Kane, Jon Davis, founder and former director of the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA in Creative Writing, discussed the wide range of Kane’s work. “One week she might be on the threatened strip of land that is Sitnasuak, Alaska, without electricity or running water, and the next on a panel in a Finnish city.”

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