Persons Unknown

Jake Adam York was born in West Palm Beach, Florida in 1972. He studied architecture and English at Auburn University and received a M.F.A. and Ph.D. in creative writing and English literature from Cornell University. He was an associate professor at the University of Colorado, Denver and founded the university's literary journal Copper Nickel in 2002. He also served in editorial capacities at other literary journals across the country and was a visiting professor at Kenyon College and Emory University.

He was the author of three collections of poetry and a book of literary history. His first collection, Murder Ballads, was published in 2005 and won the Elixir Press Poetry Prize. The next collection, A Murmuration of Starlings, was published in 2008 and won the Colorado Book Award for Poetry and the Crab Orchard Prize in Poetry. Persons Unknown was published in 2010. He had been named a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in poetry for 2013. He died from a sudden stroke on December 16, 2012 at the age of 40.

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