It is with great sadness that we report the death of poet and University of Wyoming professor Craig Arnold. Craig has been missing since April 26 on the Japanese island of Kuchino-erabu-shima and presumed dead since May 8, when an international nonprofit search and rescue team, 1SRG, determined that he fell from a steep cliff and could not have survived the fall. The Canyons, an expert mountaineering team based in Tokyo, were unable to find or recover Craig from the area where he fell. At the time of this writing, the search has been suspended, but Craig’s family intend to continue looking for Craig until he is found and brought home.
To say that Craig was an accomplished poet is an understatement. His first book, Shells, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, the most prestigious first book prize in American poetry. His second collection, Made Flesh, was published just this year, to great acclaim. Other honors include the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, which allowed him to spend six months in Spain; a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; the Alfred Hodder Fellowship in the Humanities at Princeton University; the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship, which allowed him to spend a year at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in Rome; a Fulbright to Columbia this past fall; and a Creative Artists Exchange Fellowship from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission this spring.
Craig was heavily involved in a number of council grant projects, most notably in bringing writers such as Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, and Art Speigelman to Wyoming. He was also involved with council programs, such as last year’s Beat Generation reading series, Denver tour and traveling poetry slam.
The Wyoming Humanities Council would like to add our voice to the worldwide chorus now mourning Craig’s passing. Our sympathies are with Craig’s admirers, friends, and family. He will be sorely missed.
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