Every academic year, the creative writing program invites several distinguished writers to campus to give a public reading and spend time with our students. Since 2014, the Department of English and the Creative Writing Program have hosted the annual Jake Adam York Memorial Reading. Jake’s poetry engaged in an ongoing and ambitious project of elegizing the martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement. He accepted the burden of history in his work and wrote with unflinching passion, courage, and moral complexity about life in the South. Thus, this annual reading in his memory features a distinguished poet or prose writer whose work, like Jake’s, engages with history and/or issues of social importance.
Speakers
2025-2026
Blas Falconer is the author of five books of poetry—Rara Avis, Forgive the Body This Failure, The Foundling Wheel, A Question of Gravity and Light, and The Perfect Hour. He is also a co-editor for The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity (University of Arizona Press, 2011) and Mentor & Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010). Falconer is a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and teaches in the MFA program at San Diego State University.
