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. Both books chronicled and eulogized the martyrs of the Civil Rights movement.
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, York was the University of Mississippi's Summer Poet in Residence. On February 14, 2010, York was awarded the Third Coast Poetry Prize.
He was also a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in poetry.
Read more about this topic: Jake Adam York
Famous quotes containing the word poetry:
“Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A really great poet is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quite well developed civilizations can produce good prose. So don’t think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small children, and to the amount of chanting and singsong in their speech, you’ll see what I mean.”
—Northrop Frye (1912–1991)
“If there’s no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.”
—Robert Graves (1895–1985)