Duane Niatum

Poet, fiction writer, playwright, and editor Duane Niatum has been has been writing poems, stories and essays for over 50 years. Born Duane McGinniss in Seattle, he adopted the name of one of his S’Klallam tribal ancestors early in his career as a poet.  As a child and youth, he studied S’Klallam tribal ways with his maternal grandfather. At age 17, Niatum joined the Navy and was stationed in Japan. He earned a BA from the University of Washington, where he studied with Theodore Roethke and Elizabeth Bishop, an MA from Johns Hopkins University, and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Michigan.
 
Niatum's writing is deeply connected with the Northwest coast landscape, its mountains, forests, water and creatures. The legends and traditions of his ancestors help shape and animate his poetry. He has published numerous collections of poetry, including Ascending Red Moon Cedar (1974); Song for the Harvester of Dreams (1980), which won the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award; and Drawings of the Song Animals: New and Selected Poems (1991).  His more current books of poetry are The Crooked Beak of Love (2000), The Pull of the Green Kite (2011), Agate Songs on the Path of Red Cedar (2011) and Earth Vowels (2017). In 2020, he published Why Teach American Indian Literature in World Literature Today magazine as part of the Cultural Cross Sections series.

In a review of The Crooked Beak of Love (2000) for Raven Chronicles, scholar David L. Moore observed, “Niatum’s intense love poems, so wrapped in an individual consciousness, tend toward tragedy, whereas his poems of nature and culture, striving for a voice rising on the wind in the cedars of his ancestors, tend toward reconciliation of history and promise.”

A former editor for Harper & Row’s Native American Authors series, Niatum also edited the Native American literature anthologies Carriers of the Dream Wheel (1975) and Harper’s Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry (1988). His own poetry has been widely anthologized and translated into more than a dozen languages. Several of his essays on American Indian literature and art have been published in the U.S. and Europe. Niatum has been invited to read at the Library of Congress and the International Poetry Festival in the Netherlands.
 
Niatum’s honors include residencies at the Millay Colony for the Arts and Yaddo, the Governor’s Award from the State of Washington, and grants from the Carnegie Fund for Authors and the PEN Fund for Writers. He was four times nominated for a Pushcart Prize and received the 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award from Native Writers Circle of the Americas, Returning the Gift.

Niatum lives in Seattle and has taught at Evergreen State College, the University of Washington, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Pacific Lutheran University and Western Washington University, as well as area high schools.