Jake Adam York (1972–2012) was the author of three books of poetry, Persons Unknown (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), A Murmuration of Starlings (Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), which won the 2008 Colorado Book Award in Poetry, and Murder Ballads (Elixir Press, 2005). York’s poems appeared in numerous journals including The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Gulf Coast, New Orleans Review, The Rumpus, Oxford American, Cincinnati Review, and DIAGRAM. He was named a 2013 Literature Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2011 was the Richard L. Thomas Chair in Creative Writing at Kenyon College. He was also a 2011–2012 Visiting Faculty Scholar at Emory University’s James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference, where he began a critical study of artistic responses to the Civil Rights Movement entitled Two or Three Forevers: Contemporary Art and Civil Rights Memory. He was the 2009 Summer Poet-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi and the recipient of a 2002 Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship. York served as associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of Colorado Denver. He was an editor at Copper Nickel and a contributing editor for Shenandoah.