The creative writing professor received the United States Artists Fellowship for writing.
By Cara Nixon
June 26, 2025
Professor Joan Naviyuk Kane received the United States Artists Fellowship for writing this past spring. The award gives artists and collaboratives $50,000 in unrestricted funding and selects fellows who demonstrate artistic integrity and make significant contributions to the creative ecosystem.
Kane has a wide body of work, spanning poetry, essay collections, and short stories. Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak (King Island) and Qawiaraq (Mary's Igloo), Alaska, Kane’s work often centers tribal identity and how it intersects with grief, motherhood, and land.
Recently, Kane co-edited . Her upcoming works, which will be helped by the USA Fellowship award, include a chapbook, essay collection, and poetry collection.
The chapbook, & all the ones who chose to leave her, was shaped by the role of Catholicism in Kane’s family and her experience moving away from Anchorage, Alaska, in 2019. Set to be published in fall 2028, the chapbook won the 2024 Omnidawn Chapbook Contest, with one judge noting: “Here, poems are in motion. They are outposts, linguistic flotillas, a repository scraped by the incursions of colonialism and the church. While loss hovers over these worlds/words, they move toward triumph.”
Kuułqhuzuk and Others, which Kane is co-editing, collects essays surrounding the topics of matriarchy, tribal identity, futurity, and cultural criticism. Some of the essays observe and question the situation of Alaska and other geopolitics in the Arctic. Others focus on Native writers and their negotiations with their ancestors.
Of the poetry collection, snow pouring southward past the window, Kane says, “The speakers of the poems in this collection turn with, towards, and for relatives and beloveds across seas and oceans, continents and nations, languages and histories—into belief.” To be released in early 2026, the collection was written across location, between New England, Inuit Nunaat, Sápmi, the Pacific Northwest, and the “Old World,” and across time, through the pandemic and political upheaval. “It includes literary translations across several dialects of the Inupiaq language, and re-complexifies Arctics at a time when empires once again seem interested in flattening and erasing millennia of Indigenous inhabitation, care, and situatedness,” Kane says.
Kane, who has been nominated to apply for the USA Fellowship many times, felt both surprised and relieved when she found out she’d won.
“I hope that people who hear about this are reminded that supporting artists and supporting creative culture bearers and culture makers in this time is really vital,” Kane says, “whether it means buying books, if that's an option, checking out books from the library, or finding and making artistic community.”
While she’s taught at Reed, Kane says students have been an example of why that kind of community can be so vital. “Reed students have really inspired me with their support of each other,” she says, “and with their eagerness to make connections across writing communities in the Portland area.”