The Jake Adam York Prize for a first or second poetry collection is a collaboration between Copper Nickel and Milkweed Editions.
The prize-winning poet receives $2,000 and publication by Milkweed Editions.
Initial screening for the prize will be facilitated by the poetry editors of Copper Nickel. (All screeners for the prize will have published at least one book of poetry.) The winner is announced in early March. See Guidelines.
Our goal in instituting the Jake Adam York Prize is to honor Jake’s name and legacy with a top-tier, ethical book prize that will offer not just publication but also high-quality design, marketing, and strong national distribution. Milkweed Editions—which has an excellent marketing team and national distribution through Publishers Group West (PGW)—can offer these things. We at Copper Nickel are grateful and excited for their partnership.
Copper Nickel—the national literary journal housed at the University of Colorado Denver—was founded by poet Jake Adam York in 2002. When York died in 2012, the journal went on hiatus until its re-launch in 2014.
Work published in Copper Nickel has been reprinted in the Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, Best Small Fictions, Best Literary Translations, and Pushcart Prize anthologies, and has been listed as “notable” in the Best American Essays anthology.
Contributors to Copper Nickel have received numerous honors for their work, including the National Book Award; the National Book Critics Circle Award; the Pulitzer Prize; the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; the American, California, Colorado, Minnesota, and Washington State Book Awards; the Nobel Prize; the Georg Büchner Prize; the TS Eliot and Forward Poetry Prizes; the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize; the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; the Whiting Writers Award; the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award; the Lambda Literary Award; and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts; the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill, Witter Bynner, Soros, Rona Jaffe, Bush, and Jerome Foundations; the Bunting Institute; Cave Canem; and the American Academy in Rome. Other contributors have had their first published work appear in our pages.