At age 40, Jake Adam York died unexpectedly on December 16^th, 2012. He was an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver. His three books of poetry were, most recently, Persons Unkown, A Murmuration of Starlings, which won the 2008 Colorado Book Award in Poetry, and Murder Ballads. A month before his death he was chosen to be a 2013 Literature Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts.

His work measured and chronicled the history and legacy of the Civil Rights movement. The son of a steel worker and a history teacher, he grew up in Gadsden, Alabama. Natasha Trethewey, current US Poet Laureate and close friend of York’s, praised his encyclopedic knowledge and his ability to confront racism in seemingly effortless poems.

“He was someone whose work embodied the creative notion that out of the quarrel with others, we make rhetoric, and out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry,” said Trethewey.

Sources: http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_22216151/jake-adam-york-poet-who-chronicled-civil-rights , http://articles.latimes.com/2012/dec/17/entertainment/la-et-jc-poet-jake-adam-york-age-40-has-died-20121217