Jake Adam York and Aaron Anstett

Two award-winning Colorado poets. Jake’s books include Murder Ballads and A Murmuration of Starlings; Aaron’s include No Accident and Each Place the Body’s.
Thursday May 1st at 7PM in McHugh Commons.
All Events are free and open to the public • For information call 719.389.6853

April 24: Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Reading, Jake Adam York

York also won a Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award this year, and his collection, "A Murmuration of Starlings," is now available from SIU Press. The collection is not about birds – it is about "martyrs in the fight for civil rights." He is an associate professor of English at the University of Colorado Denver, a contributing editor to the journal Shenadoah and poetry editor for storySouth. His poetry is in journals including Blackbird, Greensboro Review, Shenadoah and New Orleans Review. His first book of poems, "Murder Ballads," appeared in 2005. Note that his reading is set for the SIUC Student Center Video Lounge.

The University of Nebraska Press published Just Breathe Normally, Peggy Shumaker's new book of lyrical nonfiction. Her most recent book of poetry is Blaze, a collection of sensual Alaskan paintings and poems. This collaboration with the painter Kesler Woodward was published in 2005 by Red Hen Press. Her previous books include Underground Rivers (Red Hen Press), Wings Moist from the Other World, The Circle of Totems, Braided River, and Esperanza's Hair. Her poems have been published in Russia, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, England, and throughout the United States. Her nonfiction has appeared in Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction (Norton), A Road of Her Own (Fulcrum), Under Northern Lights (U. WA Press), A Year in Place (U. UT Press), Prairie Schooner and Ascent.

Peggy Shumaker was born in La Mesa, California, and grew up in Tucson, Arizona. She earned her B.A. in English and M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. Shumaker was writer in residence for the Arizona Commission on the Arts, working with prison inmates, honors students, gang members, deaf adults, teen parents, little kids, library patrons, and elderly folks. She has given readings in art galleries, a governor's mansion, a clearing in the woods, an abandoned bank, on reservations, in libraries, at a gold dredge, under the hoodoos at Bryce Canyon, on a riverboat, and at many bookstores, community centers, and universities

Shumaker won a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and several awards for teaching. She served as Poet in Residence at the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University and as President of the Board of Directors of the Associated Writing Programs. Professor emerita from University of Alaska Fairbanks, Shumaker was Chair of the English Department and Director of the M.F.A. program in Creative Writing. She currently teaches in the low-residency Rainier Writing Workshop. Peggy Shumaker and her husband Joe Usibelli live in Fairbanks, Alaska, and travel widely.

Jake Adam York is the author of Murder Ballads (2005), selected by Jane Satterfield for the Fifth Annual Elixir Press Awards Judge's Prize, and A Murmuration of Starlings, selected by Cathy Song for the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry (2008).

His poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Oxford American, Greensboro Review, Gulf Coast, New Orleans Review, Quarterly West, Diagram, Octopus, Southern Review, Poetry Daily, and other journals as well as in the anthologies Visiting Walt (Iowa University Press, 2003) and Digerati (Three Candles, 2006).

York is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Colorado Denver, where he directs an undergraduate Creative Writing program and produces Copper Nickel with his students.

I’ve also been reading Jake Adam York’s new book, A Murmuration of Starlings. Jake’s one of my favorite poets writing today. He does this whole “documentary lyric” thing that I find really cool.

A Murmuration of Starlings by Jake Adam York (So. Illinois, 2008)
recommended by David Wojahn
York's notes to the volume state that it is "part of an ongoing project to elegize and memorialize the martyrs of the Civil Rights movement." The book proves worthy of its goal. It's a large and sweeping documentary poem in the tradition of Rukeyser's Book of the Dead and Reznikoff's Testimony, with a cast of characters ranging from Emmett Till to Sun Ra. Long poem projects along these lines often seem tethered to their "research" and end up smelling like a library carel—not so York's collection. His struggle with the benighted history of his native South is conveyed with great urgency, and with a terse concision that brings to mind the early work of Heaney. It's a book of unusual ambition and range. – DW

April is not the cruelest month. Not this time anyway. Thank you.