DONALD N. YATES

Donald N. Yates (also published as Donald Panther-Yates) was born in 1950 in Cedartown, Georgia and is of one-quarter American Indian descent. He was educated at Stetson University, University of Freiburg, University of Vienna, Duke University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has taught at St. John's University, University of West Florida, Georgia Southern University and University of Notre Dame. His first book was The Bear Went over the Mountain, a genealogy and social history of the Yates family of Virginia. With Elizabeth Caldwell Hirschman he has co-authored the research trilogy about hidden Jewish ancestry, When Scotland Was Jewish (2007), Jews and Muslims in British Colonial America: A Genealogical History (2012) and The Early Jews and Muslims of England and Wales: A Genetic and Genealogical History (2013). He is the author of Old World Roots of the Cherokee: How DNA, Ancient Alphabets and Religion Explain the Origins of America's Largest Indian Nation (2012) and Old Souls in a New World: The Secret History of the Cherokee Indians (2013). He also publishes a series called Cherokee Chapbooks aimed at making essential texts and traditional American Indian storytelling accessible to those rediscovering their Native roots. Yates has written poetry for nearly fifty years in a variety of styles and traditions, including verse translations of Catullus, Horace, Goethe and Rainer Maria Rilke. His teachers were first and foremost the Southern poets Herman Salinger and William Taylor. Many of his poems have been published in little magazines. The Doppelganger and Other Poems is his first collection.