Retired Kent State Ashtabula professor wins poetry award
Mar. 2—ASHTABULA — Roger Craik, emeritus professor of English at Kent State University at Ashtabula, has been named a semi-finalist for the North Street Book Prize 2022.
Craik was one of the final four out of nearly 2,000 entrants.
The judges wrote: "We admired 'In Memory of Wendy Ann Craik," a book written in tribute of his late mother.
The North Street Book Prize is a competition for self-published books, which is a nominee for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in poetry.
Craik also won the Oprelle Poetry Contest for his poem "Visit Home."
The chief judge, Karen Croftcheck, writes, "Roger Craik has the distinct honor of being chosen as No. 1 in a group of very talented entries in this season's Coming Home Poetry Contest," and adds, "Oprelle Publications has continued to grow quickly and seeks to be a platform that highlights only the kind of writing that gives you goosebumps, or makes you feel hopeful and alive."
Craik is working on his 10th poetry book titled, "Alightings," which is a word he said that appeals to him as it means to find or unexpectedly see something.
He's spending his retirement traveling, writing poetry and fulfilling speaking engagements.
Craik is set to visit Amsterdam in May to give poetry readings at the University of Amsterdam and to members of the Amsterdam Poetry Society.
Several of Craik's full-length poetry books have been translated into different languages, including, "In Memory of Wendy Ann Craik," which has been translated into Belarusian by Professors Lyuba Pervushina and Ivan Charota at the University of Minsk in Belarus, a small land-locked country that was once part of the USSR. More recently, a selection of poems from his book, "In Other Days," has just come out in Belarusian in the journal "Maladost."
English by birth and educated at the universities of Reading and Southampton, Craik has worked as a journalist, TV critic and chess columnist. Before coming to the U.S. in 1991, he worked in Turkish universities and was awarded a Beineke Fellowship to Yale in 1990.
He's widely traveled, having visited North Yemen, Egypt, South Africa, Tibet, Nepal, Japan, Amsterdam, Bulgaria — where he taught during spring 2007 on a Fulbright Scholarship to Sofia University — and, more recently, the United Arab Emirates, Austria and Croatia.
Craik does not take his academic and writing success for granted.
"I am always mindful of the late Dean of the Ashtabula campus, John Mahan, who hired me in 1991," he said. "I like to think that he would have been proud of me."
