Poets

John Straley    Jerah Chadwick    John Haines    Robert Davis Hoffman
Nora Marks Dauenhauer    Richard Dauenhauer    Gregers Dircking-Holmfeld   

Textual currator and Poet
John Straley (Sitka)

John Straley is Alaska’s current State Writer Laureate. His poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Connotations, The Seattle Times, New World Order, Runes, Wabash Magazine, and The Sonora Review. His essays and short stories have been published in the anthologies Men to Boys, Mysterious North, Powers of Detection, Connotations, The Book of the Tongass, and These United States: Leading American Writers on Their State in the Union. His work has been featured on “Fresh Air” and “CBS Sunday Morning.” John’s bestselling novels include The Woman Who Married a Bear (1993 Shamus Award for Best First Private Eye Novel), The Curious Eat Themselves, The Music of What Happens (Spotted Owl Award for the best northwest mystery of the year from the Friends of Mystery, Portland, Oregon), Death and the Language of Happiness, The Angels Will Not Care, and Cold Water Burning (nominated for best novel of the year by the Private Eye Writers of America). His novels are published by SOHO Press and Bantam Books of New York.

John has taught students of all ages in a variety of locations, ranging from preschool in the Hell's Kitchen section of New York City to University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau and the Island Institute in Sitka. He currently works as an Investigator for the Sitka Public Defender Agency. Over his years in Alaska, he has been involved in oral history and storytelling, radio production, and biological research projects.

Born in Redwood City, California, John is married to Jan Straley, a marine biologist well-known for her work on whales. They have lived in Sitka, Alaska since 1977, and have one son, Finn.

"My part in the “Maroon Settings” project was straightforward. I was asked to consider the word “Maroon” in all its meanings and suggest contemporary Alaskan writers’ work to a group of composers from around the world and let them choose the words that would inspire their original works.

I had a stack of more than twenty books and I typed selections from my favorite Alaskan poets, essayists, historians and nature writers. I sent out dozens of pieces; the only thing that I think unified them was the soulful feeling I took from their words and a suspicion that the selections somehow resonated with the word “Maroon.” I laid out dozens of choices and waited for responses. Some composers wanted more choices; others knew right away that they had found the beginnings of their music.

I was quite happy with their choices. Haines, Chadwick, and Davis-Hoffman are writers as diverse as our state. Each of them displays the genius of attentive human minds sunk deep into this sometimes crowded and sometimes isolated State. The fact that this diverse group of composers chose these poets does not surprise me. These artists’ inventive imaginations and keen perceptions are the natural starting point for an extraordinary collaboration. I am honored to have some small part in their magic."

back to top

Poet
Jerah Chadwick (Unalaska)

Alaska State Writer Laureate from 2004-2006, Jerah Chadwick is a 25-year resident of Unalaska in the Aleutian Islands, where he originally went to raise goats and write, and where since 1988 he has taught for and directed the University of Alaska’s extension program for the Aleutian region. For the past 10 years, he has participated as an assistant bentwood hat-making instructor at Camp Qungaayu, a regional Aleut culture camp held in Unalaska. Jerah is an enrolled Honorary member of the Qawalangin Tribe of Unalaska, having been adopted on August 2, 2008.

Chadwick holds degrees from Lake Forest College (Illinois) and the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and is a recipient of an Alaska State Council on the Arts Writing Fellowship. Chadwick's poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies in the U.S., Canada, and Ireland. He is the author of three chapbooks, The Dream Horse (Seal Press, Seattle), From the Cradle of Storms (State Street, New York), and Story Hunger (Salmon Publishing).  In 1983, he served as guest editor for Contemporary Art and Writing of the Aleutian Islands (Penumbra, Ontario). Anthologies containing Chadwick’s work include New Men, New Minds (Crossing Press, 1986), Contemporary Art and Writing of the Aleutian Islands (Penumbra Press, 1983), The Alaska Reader (Fulcrum, 2005), Atomic Ghosts (Coffee House Press, 1995), From the Island's Edge (Gray Wolf Press, 1995), Season of Dead Water (Breitenbush Books, 1990), State Street Reader (State Street Press, 1990), and INROADS: 27 Alaskan Writers (University of Alaska Press, 1989). He has also published in literary journals, including Writers' Forum, Permafrost, Wilderness, Northern Review, Passages North, Mid-American Review, New York Quarterly, Cutbank, Ice-Floe, James White Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Bellingham Review, and Crab Creek Review.

"Increasingly over the past 26 years of my residency in Unalaska, my work has become rooted in the heart-breaking beauty, the turbulent history, and the weather of this place, which is—as perhaps all places are—a microcosm of our nation and its history and, so, of our own collective and personal histories.

“If Alaska is the last frontier,” John Haines has written, “it may be because it represents the last full-scale attempt in North America to build a society worthy of human life, worthy of the claims made for America in the beginning.” Such a society, I believe, must not only recognize the often terrible accommodations of its past, but acknowledge those whose land we have occupied, those whose knowledge and skills have, ironically, helped us to survive at the cost of their own survival. Harold Napolean has articulated this cost to Native Alaskan cultures. Adrienne Rich has modeled how those of us in the dominant culture must also “dive into the wreck” to recover our humanity and re-envision a future.

Any process of recovery involves inventory and amends. I hope that in some small way my work can be read as participating in such a process"

back to top

Poet
John Haines (Fairbanks)

Fairbanks resident John Haines was named Alaska’s State Writer Laureate for 1969-71. Born in 1924 in Norfolk, Virginia, Haines studied at the National Art School, the American University, and the Hans Hoffmann School of Fine Art. Author of more than ten collections of poetry, his recent works include At the End of This Summer: Poems 1948-1954 (Copper Canyon Press, 1997); The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer (1993); and New Poems 1980-88 (1990), for which he received both the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Western States Book Award. He has also published a book of essays titled Fables and Distances: New and Selected Essays (1996), and a memoir, The Stars, the Snow, the Fire: Twenty-five Years in the Northern Wilderness (1989).

Haines, who spent more than twenty years homesteading in Alaska, has taught at Ohio University, George Washington University, and the University of Cincinnati. In addition to having been named a Fellow by The Academy of American Poets in 1997, he has received the Alaska Governor's Award for the Arts, two Guggenheim Fellowships, an Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Library of Congress.

back to top

Poet
Robert Davis Hoffman
(Xaashuch'eet) (Kake/Sitka)

Robert Davis Hoffman’s poetry has been featured in various anthologies and quarterlies, including publications of the Orca Press, Copper Canyon Press, Harper & Row, The University of Arizona Press, The Greenfield Review Press, The Aperture Foundation, and National Museum of the American Indian, 2004. In 1996, Ravens Bones Press in Sitka published a volume of his poetry, titled “Soul Catcher.” He is currently working on an illustrated collection of new poems.

Born in Petersburg, Alaska, in 1954, Robert was raised in both Michigan and the village of Kake, Alaska, where both parents taught school. Although receiving his B.A. in Elementary Education in 1987, with a mind toward following in his parents' footsteps, he remained primarily a woodcarver and illustrator.

Having worked in the Alaska Native Studies department at Sheldon Jackson College until its closure last year, Robert now teaches art workshops and classes in Tlingit art. He lives in Sitka with his wife Kris, where they happily work on collaborative art projects and watch Kris's garden grow.

"I am a Tlingit Indian artist/writer from Southeast Alaska. My Tlingit name is Xaashuch'eet. I am from the Tsaagweidi Clan, House of Xaay Hit (Yellow Cedar House of Kake, Alaska). Next to poetry, my art forms are woodcarving, painting, casting and multimedia sculpture . . . As a visual artist, when I create new forms out of the old, using non-traditional materials and styles, I bridge the past and the present. Growing up half-Native and moving between two worlds has forced me to deal with inner conflicts; to make those bridges. My desire to create comes from a drive to connect the past of my Tlingit ancestors to the modern day world. As expressed in my poem Saginaw Bay, “. . . I keep going back, I keep trying to see myself against all this history . . .”

back to top

Poet, Tlingit language coach and
project advisor for “Rejoice”
Nora Marks Dauenhauer (Juneau)

Born in 1927 in Juneau, Alaska, Nora Marks Dauenhauer was raised in Juneau and Hoonah, as well as on the family fishing boat and in seasonal subsistence sites around Icy Strait, Glacier Bay, and Cape Spencer. Her first language is Tlingit; she began to learn English when entering school at the age of eight. She earned a B.A. in Anthropology from Alaska Methodist University in 1976, and is internationally recognized for her fieldwork, transcription, translation, and explication of Tlingit oral literature. Her creative writing has been widely published and anthologized, and her Raven plays have been performed in several venues internationally, including the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. In 1980 she was named Humanist of the Year by the Alaska Humanities Forum. In 1989 she received an Alaska Governor’s Award for the Arts, and in 1991 she was a winner of the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award. From 1983 to 1997 Dauenhauer served as Principal Researcher in Language and Cultural Studies at Sealaska Heritage Foundation in Juneau. In December 2004 she received the 2005 Community Spirit Award from First People’s Fund of Rapid City, SD. She is married to Richard Dauenhauer, writer and former poet Laureate of Alaska, with whom she has co-authored and co-edited several editions of Tlingit language and folklore material. She has 4 children, 13 grandchildren, and 8 great grandchildren. Nora lives in Juneau, where she is semi-retired but still continues researching, writing, consulting, and volunteering in the schools and with the broader community. Dauenhauer’s publishers include Alaska Northwest, Cambridge University Press, Carnegie Museum, De Gruyter, Graywolf Press, Greenfield Review Press, Harper and Row, Houghton Mifflin, Indiana University Press, Milkweed, Navajo Community College press, NTC, Random House, Rizzoli, Persea Books, Prentice Hall, Seattle Art Museum, University of Alaska Anchorage, University of Arizona Press, University of Nebraska Press, University of Toronto Press, University of Washington Press, Utah State University Press, W. W. Norton, and many other small and regional presses.

back to top

Poet and project advisor for “Rejoice”
Richard Dauenhauer (Juneau)

Richard Dauenhauer, who was born and raised in Syracuse, NY, has lived in Alaska since 1969. In 1980 he was named Humanist of the Year by the Alaska Humanities Forum. From 1981 to 1988 he served as the 7th Poet Laureate of Alaska. He is among the poets laureate featured in the April/May 1985 issue of Coda. In 1989 he received an Alaska State Governor’s Award for the Arts. In 1991 he was a winner of an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He is widely recognized as a translator; several hundred of his translations of poetry from German, Russian, Classical Greek, Swedish, Finnish, and other languages have appeared in a range of journals and little magazines since 1963. He holds degrees in Slavic Languages, German, and Comparative Literature. Since coming to Alaska, much of his professional work has focused on applied folklore and linguistics in the study, materials development, and teacher training of and for Alaska Native languages and oral literature. He has taught at Alaska Methodist University and Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage. From August 1983 to March 1997 he was Director of Language and Cultural Studies at Sealaska Heritage Foundation, Juneau, until that program was “downsized” and “outsourced.” In 2003 he was rehired at Sealaska Heritage Institute as a linguist. In August 2005 he accepted the position as President’s Professor of Alaska Native Languages and Culture at the University of Alaska Southeast. He is married to Nora Marks Dauenhauer, widely published and anthologized Native American writer, transcriber and translator of Tlingit oral literature. He lives in Juneau where, in addition to teaching, he works as a freelance writer and consultant.

"[. . . ]
When I was first invited by CrossSound to suggest an Alaskan Orthodox liturgical text for this project, several candidates came to mind. But ‘Rejoice’ was always on my short list and that of all the people with whom I consulted, because of its brevity, frequency of use, and theological significance. Translation of scripture and liturgical hymns was a priority of the Orthodox mission to Alaska, beginning in 1794, and this hymn was translated into various Native languages of Alaska. It is sung at the end of vespers, the sundown service that reviews salvation history from the creation of the world, through the fall and expulsion from paradise (Milton’s ‘man’s first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree’), to the promise of being reunited with God through the coming of Christ.
[ . . . ]
We are admonished in scripture to make a joyful noise to the Lord (Psalms 66:1, 100:1). This is described in glorious detail in Psalm 150: ‘Praise him with sounding cymbals; praise him with loud clashing cymbals’. Polina Medyulyanova, born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and now living in Amsterdam, takes this to heart in her commission, creating a new musical setting that is paradoxically very orthodox (following the psalmist’s instructions), and very unorthodox (nothing like what we sing in church). Many of us approach avant-garde music with some degree of apprehension, especially if it deals with religious and cultural themes, in this case an Orthodox hymn sung in four liturgical languages of Alaska: Slavonic, Tlingit, Yupik, and English (sadly, we are missing Alutiiq and Aleut). If we are anxious over the avant-garde, we should take comfort and courage in the commands of Psalms 96 and 98 to ‘Sing to the Lord a new song’.”

back to top

Gregers Dircking-Holmfeld
(Danish Author)

Gregers Dircking-Holmfeld, who hails of old noble Dutch-Danish descent, is a theatre critic and an author of books on Danish history, contemporary and ancient. In addition to the Vitus Bering monologue presented in this year’s CrossSound program, he has also made radio and television dramas on events in Denmark, ranging from the Napoleonic wars to the British bombing of Copenhagen in 1807. Gregers studied musicology at the University of Copenhagen in the 1950s and has worked ever since as a music and theatre critic. He also had a career as a television personality on talk shows through the 80s and 90s.

back to top

 
John Straley    Jerah Chadwick    John Haines    Robert Davis Hoffman
Nora Marks Dauenhauer    Richard Dauenhauer    Gregers Dircking-Holmfeld