Jake Adam York authored three books of poems: Murder Ballads, winner of the Elixir Prize in poetry; A Murmuration of Starlings, winner of the Colorado Book Award; and Persons Unknown, an editor’s selection in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry. Originally from Alabama, he was educated at Auburn and Cornell. He was a 2011–2012 Visiting Faculty Fellow at the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University. At the time of his death on December 16, 2012, he was working on a collection of poems entitled Abide, which will be published as a special edition in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, as well as a critical study of artistic responses to the Civil Rights Movement entitled “Two or Three Forevers: Contemporary Art and Civil Rights Memory.” He was also serving as an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver and coeditor of Copper Nickel.