Our former colleague, poet and assistant professor Craig Arnold, is still missing after a week of searching. Craig, who taught in the USD English Department at the University of South Dakota in 2003-04, had traveled to Japan on a creative exchange fellowship. He went missing when he was exploring a volcano on the island of Kuchino-erabu-shima. Craig has been writing a book of essays and poetry about volcanoes and has been keeping a weblog, Volcano Pilgrim: Five Months in Japan as a Wandering Poet.
Craig assisted with the Vermillion Literary Project while he was at USD, and he also was a featured poet at the VLP 2009 Poetry Festival. Craig has published two books of poetry, the award-winning Shells and, more recently, Made Flesh. You can listen to Craig read some of his poetry from Made Flesh on these two Youtube sites:
Craig is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wyoming. With the assistance of his university, a fund has been established to support the search efforts to find Craig. The Paypal link directly to the fund is here: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=5149253. You can also continue to follow the story of the search on a Facebook site that his family has established, "Find Craig Arnold."