Richard Dauenhauer

Richard Dauenhauer (April 10, 1942 – August 19, 2014) was an American poet, linguist, and translator who married into, and subsequently became an expert on, the Tlingit nation of southeastern Alaska.

With his wife and Lydia T. Black, he won an American Book Award for Russians in Tlingit America: The Battles of Sitka, 1802 And 1804.

He earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 1975 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with a dissertation titled Text and Context of Tlingit Oral Tradition.

[2] He became a professor of literature at Alaska Methodist University in Anchorage, where he came in contact with the Tlingit people in the late 1960s.

[4] Dauenhauer died on August 19, 2014, in Juneau's Bartlett Regional Hospital, after having been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a month prior.