American-Canadian poet James Arthur grew up in Toronto. His first book, Charms Against Lightning, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2012. His poems have also appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Literary Review of Canada, and The London Review of Books. He has received the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a Discovery/The Nation Prize, and a Fulbright Scholarship to the Seamus Heaney Centre in Northern Ireland. Arthur lives in Baltimore and teaches at Johns Hopkins University.

During his residence at the Camargo Foundation, Arthur wanted to write poems toward a third collection of poems, tentatively titled Shadowbox. Although some of the poems in the collection explored personal themes, others took up social and political subject matter, such as the recent resurgence of white ethnic nationalism in the United States. In addition to writing new poems during his time in Cassis, Arthur planed to consult the holdings of the Centre international de poésie Marseille.

James Arthur was in residence at the Camargo Foundation in 2019, as part of the Core Program.