As the second event in the About, to, and for series, poet Joan Naviyuk Kane reads from her latest book Dark Traffic (2021), in which she focuses on landscape, climate change, and indigenous identity.
The poems in Dark Traffic have been seen as “confronting us with where we live, demanding we take in the world in its brutal entirety” (Carolyn Ogburn) and as written “of and through storytelling, offering a landscape built on narrative itself, a landscape that is still learning how to continue to thrive, or even sustain, despite and through such outside interference, including the ongoing and destructive bludgeon and erasures of American imperialism.” (Rob Mclennan). Gala Porras-Kim’s art is complemented by a poet’s lens that exposes colonialism, cultural effacement, and the inability to construct compassionate narratives.
This is an in-person event. Free and open to the public.
Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak and Qawiaraq. The author of eight collections of poetry and prose, she is a lecturer in the department of studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora at Tufts, and teaches creative writing at Harvard, Tufts, and the Institute of American Indian Arts. She raises her sons in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Porras-Kim and Naviyuk Kane met each other during their Radcliffe Institute Fellowship in 2019-2020.
