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| Jake Adam York during an interview with Natasha Trethewey, 2008. |
Jake Adam York served faithfully on the Southern Spaces editorial board. His insight, enthusiasm, and generosity will be missed.
Jake Adam York was a poet of great vision and a deeply humane intelligence. His work to chart the history of his native South and the civil rights movement—its violence and erasures—represents a brave reclamation and reckoning: a reclamation rooted in the absolute necessity to articulate, in the elegant language of poetry, a fuller version of our American story. Beyond the sheer beauty and technical skill of his poems is a profound intervention into our ongoing conversations about race and social justice. His body of work represents a bold and necessary challenge to our historical amnesia, making him one of our most indispensable American poets.