[3] York was a big fan of rap music, including LL Cool J and Run DMC, and covered their joint bedroom in posters of his favorite rappers.

[1] York worked as an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where he was an editor for Copper Nickel, a nationally recognized student literary journal which he had helped found.

During the 2011–2012 academic year, he was a visiting faculty scholar at Emory University's James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference.

In 2005, when fiction writer Brad Vice was accused of plagiarism in his short story collection The Bear Bryant Funeral Train, York took the lead in defending the author.

[5] Vice was accused of plagiarizing part of one story from the 1934 book Stars Fell on Alabama by Carl Carmer.

[8] York wrote what has been called "poetry of witness," in particular "to elegize and memorialize the martyrs of the Civil Rights movement.

Jake Adam York's Murder Ballads — a collection of 35 poems in four parts, published by Elixir Press — is a book where context matters.

But the finely crafted poems—what Shenandoah editor R.T. Smith rightly calls York's "demanding poetic"—are not bound by that context".

His third book, Persons Unknown, was published in 2010 as an editor's selection in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry by Southern Illinois University Press.

[14] His fourth book, Abide, was completed in 2012 shortly before his death[15] and published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2014.

[citation needed]According to Adam Palumbo in The Rumpus, York's study into the Civil Rights Movement is not meant to be an indictment of the American consciousness; rather, he strives to present the stories of these persons unknown so that his reader cannot help but reflect on this murderous chapter in American history.