The University of Wyoming, in a May 8 news release, announced that missing professor and poet Craig Arnold is thought to have died on the Japanese island of Kuchinoerabu. A private search group hired by Arnold’s family believes it is likely that the award-winning poet fell from a cliff, and there is little chance of his survival. Local officials began efforts to find Arnold on April 27 after he failed to return from a hike.  Arnold was researching volcanoes in Japan through the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission’s Creative Artists Exchange Fellowship. "So many in our community and across the country were fervently hoping for Craig's safe return that this news today feels unbearable," said Beth Loffreda, director of the UW Masters of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing. Peter Parolin, head of the UW English department, said, "Knowing Craig has enriched our lives and losing him is devastating." Arnold authored two books of verse, Shells, which was chosen for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, and Made Flesh, a more recent work. His poetry has been anthologized in the Best American Poetry Series, and his poems, articles, and translations have been published in the New Republic, Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, and Yale Review, among others. Arnold has received numerous awards and honors, including a Fulbright Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Alfred Hodder Fellowship in Humanities from Princeton University, an Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.