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Jake Adam York

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Jake Adam York (1972 - December 16, 2012), born in West Palm Beach, Florida, was an American poet. He published three books of poetry: Murder Ballads, which won the 2005 Elixir Prize in Poetry; A Murmuration of Starlings, which won the 2008 Colorado Book Award in Poetry; and Persons Unknown, an editor's selection in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry.

Life

York was born in West Palm Beach, Florida, but raised in Alabama. He was educated at Auburn University and Cornell University. He was an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where he is an editor of "Copper Nickel" He has served as an editor for storySouth and as a Contributing Editor for Shenandoah.

Poetry

York's poetry appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including The New Orleans Review, The Oxford American, Poetry Daily, Quarterly West, and The Southern Review. His first book of poems, Murder Ballads, won the 2005 Elixir Prize in Poetry. His sophomore book, A Murmuration of Starlings, won the 2008 Colorado Book Award in Poetry and was published through the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry. His third book, Persons Unknown, was published in 2010 as an editor's selection in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry by Southern Illinois University Press.

Pulitzer-Prize winning author Natasha Trethewey described A Murmuration of Starlings as "a fierce, beautiful, necessary book. Fearless in their reckoning, these poems resurrect contested histories and show us that the past—with its troubled beauty, its erasures, and its violence—weighs upon us all . . . a murmuration so that we don't forget, so that no one disappears into history."

In 2009, he was the University of Mississippi's Summer Poet in Residence. On February 14, 2010, York was awarded the Third Coast Poetry Prize.

In the Spring of 2011, he was the Richard B. Thomas Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College. During the 2011-2012 academic year, he was a Visiting Faculty Scholar at Emory University's James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference.

Selected publications

Poems

Reviews and essays

Interviews

Reviews

So let me answer it straight-out: Context matters, but good poetry is not bound by it. Jake Adam York’s Murder Ballads — a collection of 35 poems in four parts, published by Elixir Press — is a book where context matters. But the finely crafted poems—what Shenandoah editor R.T. Smith rightly calls York’s “demanding poetic”—are not bound by that context.

York’s study into the Civil Rights Movement is not meant to be an indictment of the American consciousness; rather, he strives to present the stories of these persons unknown so that his reader cannot help but reflect on this murderous chapter in American history. He never sinks into oblique facts, but he does not forget them, either. He never ignores the simple truth that he is writing poetry, and crafts a collection that is moving and substantial. Persons Unknown is a necessary addition to the oeuvre of civil rights literature and the conversation it (still) invokes.

References

  1. http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v3n2/poetry/york_ja/index.htm
  2. http://www.coloradohumanities.org/content/2009-colorado-book-award-winners
  3. http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/mfa/SpiR/york.htm
  4. http://www.terrain.org/reviews/18/murder_ballads.htm
  5. http://therumpus.net/2011/08/one-of-us-is-already-gone/

External links

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