Joan Kane

Joan Kane is Inupiaq Eskimo, with family from King Island and Mary's Igloo, Alaska. She is a graduate of Harvard College and Columbia University. Her first book, The Cormorant Hunter's Wife, was published in 2009. Kane received the John Haines Award from Ice Floe Press in 2004, was a semi-finalist for the Academy of American Poets' Walt Whitman Award in 2006, and received a 2007 individual artist award from the Rasmuson Foundation. In 2009 her play, "The Gilded Tusk," won the Anchorage Musuem theater contest and she was selected as a finalist for the Poetry Foundation's Ruth Lilly Fellowship. She is a 2009 recipient of the Connie Boochever Fellowship from the Alaska State Council on the Arts, a National Native Creative Development Program recipient, and a Whiting Writers' Award winner.