York's writing reaches into past; benefits future
(March 1, 2008) 
Associate professor Jake Adam York is the director of the creative writing program at the university and works closely with students and colleagues to edit and produce Copper Nickel.
Copper Nickel, a journal of art and literature, celebrated the release of its ninth issue on March 7, and York has just published a book of his own. A Murmuration of Starlings is the second in what will more than likely be a series of 5-6 books about the Civil Rights Movement and specifically about the violence, physical and linguistic, of the movement and of segregationist resistance to it.
The inspiration for his book, York said, “emerged from a dialogue with the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Ala., which I’ve been visiting almost annually since it was dedicated in 1990. On the memorial, which marks pivotal dates in the Civil Rights Movement, are the names of 40 men, women, and children who are remembered as martyrs of the movement.”
The past month, York has begun work with a team to produce a number of short films of him reading poems in places he’s written about. Among the short films is more than an hour of dialogue between York and Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey. The short film will be available on Emory University’s Southern Spaces website later this spring.
Teaching an advanced poetry workshop and a senior seminar on lyric and narrative modes in contemporary American poetry keeps York busy. In his spare time, as if he has any, York works on his third book of poems that has yet to be titled.
~ Lydia Orth