Are there any Clojure libraries that do something like this? I think Akka supports this kind of design.
This means it's less "easy" since you have to think about this up front. But it also means you are not pigeon-holed into working around canned defaults when constructing the appropriate solution for the problem at hand.
Incidentally, in the javascript port of core.async, we are also trying to come up with a good error handling story [1]. One approach we are considering is (sort of) adapting the Erlang model, by treating goroutines' return channels as their identities. I'm researching error handling in CSP literature and prior implementations as well.