Festival Appearance:
Jake Adam York is the author of three books of poems, Murder Ballads (2005), winner of the Elixir Prize in Poetry; A Murmuration of Starlings (2008), co-winner of the Crab Orchard Open Competition and winner of the Colorado Book Award; and Persons Unknown (2010), published by Southern Illinois University Press as an editor’s selection in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry.
His work has appeared in numerous literary journals including The Southern Review, New South, Ninth Letter, Shenandoah, The Northwest Review, and Poetry Daily.
He is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver and co-edits Copper Nickel. In 2009, York was the University of Mississippi’s Summer Poet in Residence, and in 2011, he is the Richard Thomas Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College. In 2011-2012, he will be a fellow at the James Weldon Johnson Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies at Emory University.
Originally from Alabama, he was educated at Auburn and Cornell. He is also the author of a work of literary criticism, The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech in American Poetry, published by Routledge in 2005.
He is currently at work on a book of poems entitled Abide and a critical study of artistic responses to the Civil Rights Movement entitled Monument and Memento.
Persons Unknown, 2010
In this stunning continuation to the poetry collection A Murmuration of Starlings, dedicated to those who lost their lives during the Civil Rights movement, Jake Adam York presents another set of searing portraits of these martyrs -- men whose murders haunt America’s history. These elegiac and documentary poems seek justice and understanding for such sacrifices as Mack Charles Parker, lynched in Mississippi in 1959, his body disposed of in the waters of the Pearl River; Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, abducted into the depths of the Homochitto National Forest, beaten, and drowned in the Mississippi by the Ku Klux Klan; and Medgar Evers, dedicated activist, whose assassination outside his home in 1963 sent shock waves throughout the South. Drawing on photographs, articles, legal documents, and other cultural artifacts, York deftly weaves history and memory into a lyrical reckoning for these often-overlooked victims of the bitter struggle for Civil Rights.
