John Thomas York

John Thomas York was educated at Appalachian State, Wake Forest, and Duke, and he has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He has also been a Mellon Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as a recipient of fellowships from the Council for Basic Education and the National Endowment for the Humanities. For over thirty years he has taught English in the public schools. In 2003 he was named Teacher of the Year by the North Carolina English Teachers Association. His work has appeared in many regional journals, as well as in anthologies such as Word and Witness: 100 Years of North Carolina Poetry and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume III: Contemporary Appalachia. He has previously published three chapbooks, Picking Out, Johnny's Cosmology, and, in 2010, Naming the Constellations, the last published by Spring Street Editions of Sylva, NC. In 2011, he received the first annual James Applewhite Poetry Prize from the North Carolina Literary Review. He and his wife, Jane McKinney York, live in Greensboro, where they have raised their daughters, Elizabeth, Kathryn, and Rachel.

Praise for Cold Spring Rising

John Thomas York tunes a guitar strung from the stars to the dirt of a farm where memories grow. The melody may catch on tobacco or hemlocks, cobwebs or sleet, a dog or a dental appointment or the fate of a loon. And the voice shows a solid, barefoot familiarity with every setting, even when it's a two-ton Chevy flatbed that's left the ground.

—Sarah Lindsay, author of Twigs & Knucklebones

I know of few poets who recreate so effectively the awe and aching immediacy and imaginative intensity of childhood. It is a pleasure to welcome the abundance, the full range of achievement, of Cold Spring Rising, which has both the sweetness and thrilling sting of the coldest and boldest spring water.

—Robert Morgan, author of Terroir

John Thomas York remembers his farm childhood as through a golden haze, but not once does he slip into sentimentality. And when shadows come, as they must, whether he stumbles, falls, or comes up dancing, his work is, finally, a hymn of gratitude.

—Sally Buckner, editor of Word and Witness: 100 Years of North Carolina Poetry

SAMPLE POEM

Wild Turkeys

Sister and I laughed as we raced over
the grass, the wide pasture,
two fledglings released
from a cage (a one-bedroom flat),
a sidewalk, a forbidden street.
We circled our parents, who were dressed up,
their faces ripe with happiness
as they admired the farm, awash in golden light. 

And then I saw a turkey hen and two poults,
heads bobbing, the birds stepping
around a gate post.
I ran to catch them, and the hen flew
screaming over the creek, into the piney woods. 

But where did the little ones go?

Wading into memory’s tall grass,
I hear their clucking, I hear them calling
close by and then far away.
What would they tell me? What have I forgotten?
I am forever returning, listening
for the sound of laughter.