Life
York was born in West Palm Beach, Florida in 1972 to David and Linda York, who worked respectively as a steelworker and history teacher. Shortly after York's birth he and his parents moved back to Alabama, where five generations of York's family had lived.
York spent the rest of his youth in Gadsden, Alabama, where he lived in a rural house and shared a bedroom with his brother, Joe. York was a big fan of rap music, including LL Cool J and Run DMC, and covered his bedroom in posters of his favorite rappers.
As his brother Joe later said, Jake was a "15-year-old kid in northeast Alabama in 1988, where white boys didn't listen to rap. But he did, and he loved it. Listening to those guys really tapped into his love of playing with language. He went to college to become an architect, but after two quarters at Auburn — and he was an A student — he became more interested in the architecture that holds our lives together."
York graduated from Southside High School in Gadsden in 1990 and that year started at Auburn University, where he eventually earned a B.A. in English. He then received his M.F.A. and Ph.D. in creative writing and English literature from Cornell University.
Read more about this topic: Jake Adam York
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“The life of a good man will hardly improve us more than the life of a freebooter, for the inevitable laws appear as plainly in the infringement as in the observance, and our lives are sustained by a nearly equal expense of virtue of some kind. The decaying tree, while yet it lives, demands sun, wind, and rain no less than the green one. It secretes sap and performs the functions of health. If we choose, we may study the alburnum only. The gnarled stump has as tender a bud as the sapling.”
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