Duane Niatum | |
---|---|
Born | Duane McGinniss 1938 Seattle, Washington |
Occupation | Writer, teacher |
Citizenship | United States |
Alma mater | BA University of Washington MA Johns Hopkins University PhD University of Michigan |
Genres | Poetry, fiction, plays |
Duane Niatum (McGinniss) is a Native American poet, author and playwright from the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe in the northern Olympic Peninsula of the state of Washington. Niatum's work draws inspiration from all aspects of life ranging from nature, art, Native American history and humans rights. Niatum is often cited as belonging to the second wave of what critic Kenneth Lincoln has termed the Native American Renaissance.[ citation needed ]
Born in 1938 in Seattle, Washington [1] to a Klallam (Salish) mother and Italian-American father, Niatum struggled with his mixed Indigenous and Italian heritage which would trouble him for years. After his parents' divorce when Niatum was four years old, Niatum's Klallam grandfather became his surrogate father, which would leave a lasting impression as he would pass on the Klallam tribe's oral tradition which would later become intertwined into his writing.[ citation needed ]
At the age of 17, Niatum enlisted in the United States Navy, which sent him to Japan. After his military service, Niatum studied with the poets Theodore Roethke and Elizabeth Bishop at the University of Washington, where he earned his B.A. in English. He went on to earn an M.A. at Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, where he studied American culture. [1] His dissertation focused on the life and art of the Aleut sculptor John Hoover.[ citation needed ]
Niatum established himself as one of the most influential promoters of Native American poetry when he served as editor of a Native American author series at Harper & Row Publishers, where he edited two influential anthologies: Carriers of the Dream Wheel: Contemporary Native American Poetry (1975) and Harper's Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry (1988). [2] [3] He has published numerous essays on Native American literature, and his own poetry has been translated into more than a dozen languages. [1]
Niatum has said his greatest influences include his Klallam grandfather and literary mentors Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Keats. [3]
In the preface to his 2000 book The Crooked Beak of Love, Niatum described the impact of his mixed ancestry on his life and work: "My aesthetic position has always been to learn and grow from whatever sources of knowledge are available...Art continues to offer the opportunity of surviving in both worlds no matter how challenging that may become at times." He also explained his grandfather's influence on his writing: "My grandfather's life and stories became the touchstones of my life and art. The center of my artistic self starts from his home and his parents' home which was almost on the beach." [3]
Niatum has taught at Seattle-area high schools as well as colleges and universities including The Evergreen State College, the University of Washington, Pacific Lutheran University, Western Washington University, and the University of Michigan. [1]
Duane Niatum.
Niatum has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize four times, been awarded residencies at Yaddo and Millay Colony for the Arts, and received grants from the Carnegie Fund for Authors and the PEN Fund for Writers. [1]
He has also received the following awards:[ citation needed ]
Sequim is a city in Clallam County, Washington, United States. It is located along the Dungeness River near the base of the Olympic Mountains. The 2020 census counted a population of 8,018, with an estimated population in 2021 of 8,241.
Theodore Huebner Roethke was an American poet. He is regarded as one of the most accomplished and influential poets of his generation, having won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1954 for his book The Waking, and the annual National Book Award for Poetry on two occasions: in 1959 for Words for the Wind, and posthumously in 1965 for The Far Field. His work was characterized by a willingness to engage deeply with a multifaceted introspection, and his style was overtly rhythmic, with a skilful use of natural imagery. Indeed, Roethke's mastery of both free verse and fixed forms was complemented by an intense lyrical quality that drew "from the natural world in all its mystery and fierce beauty."
The Klallam are a Coast Salish people Indigenous to the northern Olympic Peninsula. The language of the Klallam is the Klallam language, a language closely related to the North Straits Salish languages. The Klallam are today citizens of four recognized bands: Three federally-recognized tribes in the United States and one band government in Canada. Two Klallam tribes, the Jamestown S'Klallam and Lower Elwha Klallam, live on the Olympic Peninsula, and one, the Port Gamble S'Klallam, on the Kitsap Peninsula in Washington state. In Canada, the Scia'new First Nation is based at Becher Bay on southern Vancouver Island in British Columbia.
The Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe is a federally recognized tribe of S'Klallam or Klallam Native Americans. They are on the northern Olympic Peninsula of Washington state in the northwestern United States.
Tess Gallagher is an American poet, essayist, and short story writer. Among her many honors were a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts award, Maxine Cushing Gray Foundation Award.
Gladys Cardiff is an Eastern Band Cherokee poet and academic, with interests in Native American, African-American and American literature. She was an associate professor at Oakland University from 1999 to 2013.
The Chimakum, also spelled Chemakum and Chimacum Native American people, were a group of Native Americans who lived in the northeastern portion of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state, between Hood Canal and Discovery Bay until their virtual extinction in 1902. Their primary settlements were on Port Townsend Bay, on the Quimper Peninsula, and Port Ludlow Bay to the south.
Edward M. Hirsch is an American poet and critic who wrote a national bestseller about reading poetry. He has published nine books of poems, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of work, and Gabriel: A Poem (2014), a book-length elegy for his son that The New Yorker called "a masterpiece of sorrow." He has also published five prose books about poetry. He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York City.
Klallam,Clallam, Ns'Klallam or S'klallam, is a Straits Salishan language historically spoken by the Klallam people at Becher Bay on Vancouver Island in British Columbia and across the Strait of Juan de Fuca on the north coast of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. The last native speaker of Klallam as a first language died in 2014, but there is a growing group of speakers of Klallam as a second language.
The Native American Renaissance is a term originally coined by critic Kenneth Lincoln in the 1983 book Native American Renaissance to categorise the significant increase in production of literary works by Native Americans in the United States in the late 1960s and onwards. A. Robert Lee and Alan Velie note that the book's title "quickly gained currency as a term to describe the efflorescence on literary works that followed the publication of N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn in 1968". Momaday's novel garnered critical acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969.
Pattiann Rogers is an American poet, and a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. In 2018, she was awarded a special John Burroughs Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Nature Poetry.
Carolyn Ashley Kizer was an American poet of the Pacific Northwest whose works reflect her feminism. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985.
Lenard Duane Moore in Jacksonville, North Carolina. He is a writer of more than 20 forms of poetry, drama, essays, and literary criticism, and has been writing and publishing haiku for more than 20 years.
Milton Kessler (1930-2000) was a poet and academic who spent most of his career at Binghamton University. He was one of the founders of the institution's creative writing program.
James L. White was an American poet, editor and teacher.
David Russell Wagoner was an American poet, novelist, and educator.
Tiffany Midge is a Native American poet, editor, and author, who is a Hunkpapa Lakota enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux.
Roberta Hill Whiteman is an Oneida Nation poet from Wisconsin. She is known for the collections Star Quilt (1984) and Philadelphia Flowers (1996). She received the 1991 Wisconsin Idea Foundation's Excellence Award.
Hazel M. Sampson was an American Klallam elder and language preservationist. Sampson was the last native speaker of the Klallam language, as well as the oldest member of the Klallam communities at the time of her death in 2014. She was a member of the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe of Washington.
"Root Cellar" is a poem written by the American poet Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) published in Roethke's second collection, The Lost Son and Other Poems, in 1948 in Garden City, New York. The poem belongs among Roethke's series of "Greenhouse Poems" the first section of The Lost Son, a sequence hailed as "one of the permanent achievements of modern poetry" and marked as the point of Roethke's metamorphosis from a minor poet into one of "the first importance", into the poet James Dickey would regard among the greatest of any in American history.