Duane Niatum, S’Klallam, was born in Seattle, Washington in 1938 and has spent most of his life there. At 17, he enlisted in the Navy and spent two years in Japan. Returning, he completed his undergraduate studies in English at the University of Washington in 1970. In 1972 he obtained an MA from Johns Hopkins University. As a graduate student there, Duane taught American and European literature writing seminars. After receiving his Masters degree, he served as editor of the Harper and Row Native American Author Series. He then taught English and Literature in high school in Seattle for two years and edited the Carriers of the Dream Wheel anthology. He has also worked with the elderly in the Artist in the City program of the Seattle Arts Commission. Duane returned to graduate school and received his PhD from the University of Michigan in the Program in American Culture. In his dissertation, he discusses the life and art of the Aleut sculptor, John Hoover.
Duane has taught as at The Evergreen State College, the University of Washington, Eastern Washington University, Seattle Central Community College, Western Washington University, Northwest Indian College and the University of Michigan. In addition he has held a Visiting Instructorship at the Foundation Scolaire et Culturelle Internationale Complexe de Valbonne in Valbonne, France. He has been a teaching curriculum developer, History and Culture of the Northwest Coast Indian, in the College of Education at the University of Washington and an assistant librarian in libraries at the University of Washington and the New York Historical Society.
Duane has worked in the Poets in the Schools programs in Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington. He has given numerous poetry readings, including the Portland Poetry Festival, the Anacortes Arts Festival, Phoenix Indian High School, the University of California at Berkeley. He has held residencies at Millay Arts and at Yaddo. He has been invited to read at the International Poetry Festival in Rotterdam, The Netherlands and at the Library of Congress. Besides judging poetry for the Washington Poet’s Association and the King County Arts Commission, he has served as guest editor Pacific Search in 1975, Niagara in 1976, and Western Edge in 1978. His poetry has appeared in over 100 magazines and newspapers, including Prairie Schooner and The American Poetry Review, and over 40 anthologies. It has been translated into thirteen languages, including Dutch, Macedonian, Russian, Danish, Polish, Icelandic, and Frisian.
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.