Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Book Launch

Kara Briggs launches You and I, and Spilyay in a special evening at the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation In Southeast Portland. She is joined by poet Joan Kane and author Ursula Pike.

Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak and kin villages of the Qawairaq region. Kane’s books of poetry include The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife (2009), Hyperboreal (2013), Milk Black Carbon (2017), Dark Traffic (2021), and with snow pouring southward past the window (2026) in addition to the prose and poetry chapbooks The Straits (2013), Sublingual (2018), A Few Lines in the Manifest (2018), Another Bright Departure (2019), and Ex Machina (2023). Their co-edited volumes include the Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology (2017), Circumpolar Connections: Creative Indigenous Geographies of the Arctic (2025), and the forthcoming Colonialism and the Environment: Pasts, Presents, Futures in 2027. Kane’s recent honors include the 2026 Shelley Memorial Award, a 2025 United States Artist Fellowship, and the 2023 Paul Engle Prize from the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature. Kane has raised two children as a single mother in Alaska, Massachusetts, and Oregon, and now servers as Chair and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Reed College.