Craig Czury is from the Northeast region of Pennsylvania. A 2022 Fulbright Scholar to Northern Chile, Craig spent fifteen of his early years hitchhiking North America, working odd jobs and studying poetry with some of America's preeminent poets. He also counts among his teachers myriad European, Middle East, and Latin American poets translated to English.

“Growing up in immigrant labor communities, English wasn’t my first language, broken English was, in all of its visceral tones and undertones, like poetry.”

Craig is first and foremost a poet, with over 20 books of poetry in publication, many of which have been translated into various languages: Albanian, Croatian, Italian, Lithuanian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian.  He holds a Masters of Fine Arts degree from Wilkes University.

For over four decades, Craig has conducted poetry, life-writing, writing as healing, and Poem Fusion (multi-voice poetry performance) workshops in schools, prisons, homeless shelters, universities, mental hospitals, community centers, and poetry festivals all over the world. From 1984-2015, he worked continually with Arts-In-Education programs throughout the Mid-Atlantic states. He was a poetry consultant for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation from 1988-2000.

Craig's concept of poetry as a public act of coming together has been enacted over and over again across the globe. Some highlights over the years of "making public poetry happen" include:
 

• 1993 - Key to the City of Scranton
  for his intergenerational Scranton Poem Opera, written and performed with community students, parents, and elders in the community.
   

• 1995-1996 - AmeriCorps* WritersCorps 
  worked on projects in Washington DC schools and in St. Elizabeth's Psychiatric Hospital, where he conducted poetry workshops with inpatients, 50 years after Ezra Pound was a "patient" there.
   

• 1999  - Americans for the Arts
              Artist Exchange Fellowship & The Derry Playhouse  
  traveled to Northern Ireland to create common space between Catholic and Protestant communities with his historic poetry writing workshops with students, performed for BBC Radio FOYLE.
   

• 2010-2012 - Poet Laureate of Berks County, PA
  created many  public poetry projects, including receiving a National Endowment for the Arts grant to conduct collaborative, community Poem Fusion performances and public poetry murals.
   

• 2011 - F. Lammot Belin Scholarship for Artists
  researched, wrote, and published a book of docu-poems, THUMB NOTES ALMANAC: Hitchhiking the Marcellus Shale, from his observations and interviews while hitchhiking rural roads in his native Northeast Pennsylvania's “fracking” region during the height of Marcellus Shale natural gas drilling. Featured on National Public Radio.
   

• 2016-2020 - Residency - Istituto Superiore Galileo Galilei - Crema, Italy
  taught Poetry in The Language of Science to students at a Scientific high school in Lombardia, Italy. Students were guided to stretch their minds into poetic possibilities - creating personal and collective writing, as well as poetry posters and videos. 
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• 2016-2018 - Old School Poetry Series
  at the Springville Schoolhouse Art Studios in Springville, PA, co-hosted by Kimberly Crafton. Featured top Pennsylvania poets in monthly readings. Posters jokingly advertised: "Rural Intellectualism at Its Finest".
   

• 2018 - P.E.N. Albania Honorary Membership
  toured the Balkans giving poetry readings in Albania, Macedonia, and Kosovo at universities and literary festivals. Made honorary member.
   

• 2020 - "Talking With Our Mouths Full"
  during the early days of the Covid-19 Pandemic, collaborated with The Westchester Biotech Project to create and co-host an international online poetry exchange program. In 8 episodes, it brought poets from all over the world to speak together about their lives, their poetry, and their social projects during the pandemic.
   

• 2022 - Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program
  spent 6 months as a Fulbright Professor in Northern Chile, teaching poetry and working with translation students at Universidad Arturo Prat (Iquique), as well as working with immigrants to Chile on writing projects.

Most recent awards include:

• 2019 - Alexander the Great Gold Medal for Letters & Arts
              through UNESCO/Piraeus on Salimina Island, Greece

• 2019 - Dafne Lifetime Achievement Award in Aulla, Italy.

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