Jake Adam York
Biographical information
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).
His work has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize and has placed in numerous competitions including the 2004 Campbell Corner Poetry Prize contest, the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award, the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, and others.
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.
York is also a contributing editor for Shenandoah, a co-editor of the online journal storySouth and a founding editor of Thicket, an electronic journal dedicated to Alabama writers and Alabama writing. His work of poetic history, The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech in American Poetry, was published by Routledge in 2005. His scholarship has appeared in The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, and his literary essays have appeared in Shenandoah and Florida Humanities Review.
A fifth-generation Alabamian, York was raised in and around Gadsden, Alabama, the son of a steel-worker and a history teacher. In 1994, he took at BA in English from Auburn University. He continued on to Cornell University, where he earned an MA in English (1997), an MFA in Creative Writing (1997), and a PhD in English (2000) with emphases in American Poetry, history of poetry, and Creative Writing.
York continues to extend the sequence of elegies for Civil Rights martyrs begun in Murder Ballads and A Murmuration of Starlings; he is currently at work on a third in this series of books. Meanwhile, he is at work on two unrelated projects. The first is a sequence of prose poems about farming in Alabama braided with photographs by photographer Robert A. Schaefer, Jr., entitled The Lamps Are Never Out: Portrait of an Alabama Farm. This project is now circulating. The second project is a cultural and scholarly history of barbecue in America, entitled The Meal Equally Set, a slow work for a slow food.
York is also an amateur photographer. You can view his photographs at http://www.lomohomes.com/all_jake or find his work via his website, http://www.jakeadamyork.com.