In the Queen City: A Reading at the Gadsden Public Library
Jake Adam York, University of Colorado, Denver
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Overview:
Jake Adam York read these seven poems in the Gadsden Public Library on January 26, 2008, for an audience that included friends and family members.
In various ways, all of the poems attempt to portray the complex and often obscured "psychic geography" in and around York's hometown of Gadsden, Alabama.
Several of them deal with various episodes from the Civil Rights struggles in Alabama and nearby states.
For York, these histories are inscribed in the landscape. His poems play with truth, witnessing, and collective responsibility, often related to the ghosts of the Civil Rights past.
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Presentation Sections:
A Reading at the Gadsden Public Library:
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A Reading at the Gadsden Public Library: Part 1
(14:19 min.) Texts:
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A Reading at the Gadsden Public Library: Part 2
(14:21 min.) Texts:
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A Reading at the Gadsden Public Library: Part 3
(11:26 min.) Texts:
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About Jake Adam York:
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Raised near Gadsden in northeast Alabama by his steelworker father and his mother, a history teacher, Jake Adam York studied architecture and English at Auburn University. He received an M.F.A. in creative writing and English literature from Cornell University. He is currently an associate professor of English at the University of Colorado, Denver, where he directs the creative writing program. York has published two books of poetry, Murder Ballads (2005), and A Murmuration of Starlings (2008), and his poems have appeared in various journals, including Blackbird, Diagram, Greensboro Review, Gulf Coast, H_NGM_N, New Orleans
Review, Shenandoah, and Southern Review. |
"In the Queen City: A Reading at the Gadsden Public Library" is part of Poets in Place, an ongoing series of original videos featuring poets reading and discussing their poems in locations they write about.
Presentation Sections:
