Joan Naviyuk Kane is the 2026 Shelley Memorial Award Winner

Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak (King Island) and Qawiaraq (Mary's Igloo). Her books of poetry include The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, Hyperboreal, Milk Black Carbon, Dark Traffic, and with snow pouring southward past the window in addition to the chapbooks The Straits, Sublingual, A Few Lines in the Manifest, Another Bright Departure, and Ex Machina. Her co-edited volumes include the Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology and Circumpolar Connections: Creative Indigenous Geographies of the Arctic. Forthcoming work includes the co-edited volume Colonialism and the Environment: Pasts, Presents, Futures, and the winner of the 2024 Omnidawn poetry chapbook contest, & all the ones who chose to leave her, in 2028. A graduate of Harvard College and Columbia University’s School of the Arts, she is Guggenheim Fellow, Radcliffe Fellow, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellow, United States Artists Fellow and Whiting Award and Paul Engle Prize recipient raising her children in Oregon, where she is Chair and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Reed College.
 

Selected by Heather Christle, Natalie Shapero, and Brandon Som

Judges' Citation

Joan Naviyuk Kane's poetry is meditative and charged, beautiful and brutal, at times propulsive and at times pulled shut. Her engagement with silence and the starkness of the page is resounding, kaleidoscopic, and awe-inspiring. Kane's work troubles Eurocentric and patriarchal literary traditions, attending with agility and insight to environment and ecosystem, indigeneity and survival, colonialism and devastation, family and community history, mothering and motherhood, justice, and grief. It is rare that a poet of such fierce interiority writes poems that are so relentlessly and indispensably outward-facing. An Iñupiaq writer and enrolled member of the King Island Native Community, Kane writes about her family and community’s experience—a historical and ongoing resistance to colonialism and forced assimilation in the Circumpolar North. Drawing together a poetics of lyricism, document, and community, Kane uses her extraordinary poems to interrogate the violence of colonial extractivism. Through bringing her brilliant attention to home and its rupture, Kane has shaped a vital chronicle of the erasure and preservation of Indigenous languages. She is also an essential observer of place—locating within a proprioception of verse a contingent, feminist, and transnational relationship to land. There, she opens space for vulnerability, for song, and for the authoring of futures yet to be imagined.
 

Stockholm Suite With Sea View
By Joan Naviyuk Kane

The nearest river is deep, the farthest river is deep.

The nearest I will come to myself is halfway across the world.

The road to crisis runs right through me.

The shipwreck beckons me.

The waters of the Dnieper remain dark in my memory.

The chapel of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker on Waters rises from the dark river.

The chapel stood illuminated and from this place I prayed.

The worship of holy places can take many forms.

The vernacular fails me.

The greater whitethroat, the oystercatcher, the wood pigeon made song and call.

The melancholic willow warbler, the redstart, the Eurasian crow vanished.

These like the others reappeared.

The lava flow elsewhere formed a volcanic cone with its eruption.

The harbor of a nearby town was cooled with seawater long ago.

The thralled went ashore and took shelter in the hills.

The brother of a man who was killed hunted and murdered thralls in turn.

The women have left their names to diesel tugs.

The waters churn and at times tranquilize now.