Arnold, Elizabeth 1958-

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Arnold, Elizabeth 1958-

PERSONAL:

Born June 5, 1958. Education: Attended Oberlin College and Warren Wilson College M.F.A program; University of Chicago, Ph.D., 1990.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, University of Maryland, 4137 Susquehanna Hall, College Park, MD 20742.

CAREER:

University of Chicago, Chicago IL, instructor, 1985-88; University of Montana, Missoula, visiting assistant professor of English, 1989-90; University of North Florida, Jacksonville, adjunct professor of English, 1992-93; Warren Wilson College, Asheville, NC, Joan Beebe Graduate Teaching Fellow, 1998-99, professor of poetry, 2004; currently assistant professor of English, University of Maryland, College Park. Member of poetry juries, including Bread Loaf Writers' Conference's Bakeless First Book Contest, Bunting Fellowship Program, Shelley Award of Poetry Society of America, and Fine Arts Work Center.

MEMBER:

Poetry Society of America.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Yaddo fellowship, 1995; Fundación Valparaíso fellowship, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellowship, and Friends of Writers HIP scholarship, all 1996; Robert Frost scholarship, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, 1997; Lannan Foundation fellowship, 1997-98; Bunting Fellowship in poetry from Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, 1999-2001; Robert Frost fellowship, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, 2002; Whiting Writers' Award, Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, 2002; CAPA award in poetry, University of Maryland Division of the Arts & Humanities, 2003.

WRITINGS:

(Editor and author of afterword) Mina Loy, Insel, Black Sparrow Press (Santa Rosa, CA), 1991.

The Reef (poetry), University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1999.

Civilization (poetry), Flood Editions (Chicago, IL), 2006.

Poems have appeared in Slate, TriQuarterly, Tikkun, Antioch Review, Chicago Review, Carolina Review, American Journal of Nursing, Pequod, Smartish Pace, Sagetrieb, Poetry Daily, Kalliope, Full Circle, Shank-painter, Beltway, Washingtonian, Nebo, Pipsissewa, and Penumbra.

SIDELIGHTS:

Elizabeth Arnold is a Whiting Award-winning poet and editor whose work poses questions about personal and public history. Arnold has both studied and taught at the Warren Wilson College M.F.A. program in creative writing, and she has earned numerous fellowships, as well as the 1997 Robert Frost scholarship. Her two volumes of poetry, The Reef and Civilization, "read like journal entries sent by telegraph," to quote Boston Review contributor Simon DeDeo.

In The Reef, Arnold has created poems that reflect on two illnesses she faced: cancer and depression. The poems meditate on the particulars of treatment and the wider sphere of public prurient interest, and they vary from precise accounts of therapies to musings upon the workings of a mind within an afflicted body. At the same time the poet does not dwell exclusively upon her own personal challenges but rather finds metaphors in other people, situations, and anecdotes, drawn widely from history, art, and daily life. "This debut poetry collection charts the author's struggle with cancer, and it proceeds from the premise that everything worth grasping—in language and in life—is too fluid to hold for long," wrote Angela Sorby in the Chicago Review. Arnold grapples with insomnia and radiation treatments. She describes the unsuccessful rescue of a horse from a swamp. She dwells equally upon her own challenges and on how these challenges invigorate her teenage friends and neighbors, who can view her life-threatening illness from the safe confines of their imaginations. "Arnold's illness … generates questions that are not quite answerable—or, as she puts it, ‘not quite ice yet,’" maintained Sorby, who called The Reef "an unsettling and original book."

In Civilization, Arnold uses world history to connect the self with driving forces that have shaped the mind through uncounted generations. A recurring motif involves consciousness itself—mutable, frail, prone to illogic. In one poem Arnold muses upon the ancient Romans' solstice rituals in which the participants sought to persuade the sun to return from its winter nadir. In others she confronts her father's deterioration from Alzheimer's disease and meditates upon the decline of intellect. The poet seeks to link the broad with the particular using her own experiences to reach a wider cultural understanding. Whether the distance is historical or recent, however, the poet views situations dispassionately, with fragments and meandering patterns that place a distance between artist and subject. "Moments of divergence feel deeply original," observed DeDeo in his review. Peter Campion noted in Tikkun that Arnold's "links between the individual and the world … conduct great emotional heat." Campion also found "genuine pleasure" in Arnold's "consummate artfulness."