Poet Jake Adam York, associate professor of English at the University of Colorado at Denver, won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in November shortly before his death. (handout)

Jake Adam York, who died suddenly Dec. 16 in Denver at age 40, was a poet relentlessly dedicated to the foot soldiers of the civil rights movement, with occasional forays into celebrating the virtues of barbecue.

His poem "Grace" invoked both:

"The smoke from the grill/ is the smell of my father coming home/ from the furnace and the tang/ of vinegar and char is the smell of Birmingham, the smell/ of coming home, of history, redolent/as the salt of black-and-white film/ when I unwrap the sandwich/ from the wax-paper the wax-paper / crackling like the cold grass/ along the Selma to Montgomery road,/ like the foil that held Medgar's last meal, a square of tin/ that is just the ghost of that barbecue/ I can imagine to my tongue/ when I stand at the pit with my brother/ and think of all the hands and mouths/ and breaths of air that sharpened/ this flavor and handed it down to us."

Less than a month ago, York, an associate professor of English at the University of Colorado Denver, was named a 2013 Literature Fellow of the National Endowment For The Arts. His was one of 40 applications chosen from a field of more than 1,100.

His three books, "Murder Ballads" (2005), "A Murmuration of Starlings" (2008), and "Persons Unknown" (2010) were the first installments in a continuing tribute to martyrs of the American civil rights movement.

York grew up in Gadsden, Ala., the son of a steel worker and a history teacher. He and his brother, Joe, shared a bedroom in the family home on a remote wooded road. The walls were plastered with posters of LL Cool J, Run DMC and other rappers. At night, York fiddled with his radio to catch a distant R&B station.

"This is a 15-year-old kid in northeast Alabama in 1988, where white boys didn't listen to rap," Joe York said. "But he did, and he loved it. Listening to those guys really tapped into his love of playing with language. He went to college to become an architect, but after two quarters at Auburn — and he was an A student — he became more interested in the architecture that holds our lives together."

National poet laureate and close friend Natasha Trethewey called York "MegaMind," a nod to his encyclopedic knowledge, and praised his facility for confronting racism in his deceptively effortless poems.

"He was someone whose work embodied the creative notion that out of the quarrel with others, we make rhetoric, and out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry," Trethewey said.

"There's a great poem he wrote. He's walking around Natchez, Miss., and catches his reflection in the mirror — he does this in a lot of poems — and sees, superimposed, the image of a frightening white supremacist," she said.

He had a cherubic face and bald head, a combination York knew might carry the wrong connotation. During his year as a James Weldon Johnson Fellow at Emory University, Trethewey noted that he always put on "an elegant black blazer, even if he was wearing jeans and cowboy boots, because he was so aware that his whiteness and his bald head could make him look frightening."

But when Joe York looked at his brother, he saw something else.

"In the South, we have the mockingbird, and it catalogs all the other birds' songs, and plays them out in different combinations, almost like remixes," Joe York said.

"Jake was a lot like that. He'd listen to their voices, and kind of filter them through his own. Jake's poems really are living things. To hear him read them, in his cadence — and he practiced to get it just right — was to hear that my brother was not just a man of words. He was literally made of them."

Survivors include his wife, Sarah Skeen of Denver; parents David and Linda York of Glencoe, Ala.; grandparents Harold and Lurlene Smith of Glencoe; and brother Joe York of Oxford, Miss.

A service will be held at 11 a.m. Saturday at the Episcopal Church of the Holy Comforter in Gadsden, Ala.

A celebration of life will be held in January in Denver.

Claire Martin: 303-954-1477, cmartin@denverpost.com or twitter.com/byclairemartin

In lieu of flowers, York's wife suggests any donations people wish to make go to the Southern Poverty Law Center in Jake's name. (http://www.splcenter.org.)