Photo: Lori Hawkins

Biddle Duke

I’m a journalist, writer of nonfiction, and community organizer. I went to work for newspapers drawn by a belief in their critical public service role, and spent three decades covering city halls, statehouses, governors, the environment, and our ever-changing world as a reporter and editor at papers in New York, New Mexico, Vermont and South Carolina. For several years in the 1990s I was the executive editor of The Buenos Aires Herald, an English-language daily in Argentina, and for two decades I owned and ran a group of weeklies and magazines in northern Vermont. My writing — memoir, travel, commentary — has also appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Surfers Journal, and Backcountry magazine. I currently write a column, This Place, for The Express News Group’s three weeklies serving the South Fork of Long Island. In 2016, I co-founded EAST with The East Hampton Star, a magazine that explores and celebrates the soul of easternmost New York state. I serve on the board of The Peter Matthiessen Center which seeks to inspire deep love for all life on Earth by advancing the ideas and work of thinkers and spiritual leaders, activists, and writers who are exploring our connection to the natural world, sharing indigenous wisdom, and fighting for social justice. Though a lifelong nomad (I’ve lived in seven countries and four states), eastern Long Island has always been home. I live in Springs, N.Y., with my wife, artist Idoline Duke, and our dog, Ralphie.