Craig Yorke
Neurosurgeon, author
Craig Yorke was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts. He received a BA from Harvard College and an MD from Harvard Medical School.
After residency training at the University of California, San Francisco, he practiced neurosurgery in Topeka, Kansas for nearly 25 years.
He lives in Topeka and makes coffee each morning for his wife, Mary. Their two sons are a blessing. He is a credible violinist and hits tennis balls with passion.
Steep is his first book.
Steep, The Journey of a Black Neurosurgeon
A kid from Boston’s ghetto becomes a neurosurgeon. His ancestors insist he avenge centuries of pain with a life of infinite success, but he and his elite education find their way to an unlikely destination, where he wrestles with his history and the armored identity it has imposed.
Steep traces an odyssey from a poor Boston neighborhood to a neurosurgical practice in Middle America - a story of resilience and self-discovery that will resonate with anyone who has ever wrestled with their past and its demons as they chased the American Dream.
Yorke's story will resonate with anyone who’s run from their past, anyone whose world feels too small.
"Craig Yorke writes with the deftness of a brain surgeon and the ear of a concert violinist. Steep is the unforgettably moving story of one man's life and times. But it is also a wise and courageous commentary on our time."
– Cyrus Console, Professor of Liberal Arts at the Kansas City Art Institute, and author of Brief Under Water, a book of poetry.
"Craig Yorke’s memoir is skillfully woven into the times and places it describes, taking the reader on a fascinating journey through diverse cultures and a transformative period in American history.
– Bryan Welch, former chief executive of Mother Earth News, Mindful magazine and the Utne Reader
A Few Words From The Author
I felt the impulse to write this book as I faced the Black Studies shelves of our local bookstore. It began as a letter to our sons. I marveled at the indisputable truth in those books, the scholastic rigor. Pages brimming with courage, trauma and righteous fury. Their diagnosis of America’s racial illness was brilliant, the prognosis bleak. But I found little mention of treatment, and wondered where my story could find shelf space. I felt dwarfed by the forces they described, felt as powerless as any viewer of cable news. If these authors held the whole truth my life hadn’t amounted to much.
Steep is my response to that bookstore moment. It isn’t one more tale of winning against a stacked deck. It’s a look at history’s unspoken power through the lens of seven decades. A look at how the work of remembering can bring that power to light.
The past shapes us all. Many flavors of tribal identity shrink our lives today, immunize us against a wide world filled with sublime surprise. Steep tells of waking up, of inching toward a more fluid self, toward some friendship with that past -- and toward some space for the future.
-- Craig Yorke