contributor bio

Lee Sharks’ poems have appeared in Heaven, The White House, and Inside Your Brain All the Time, among other publications. He is the winner of numerous prizes, including fourteen Guggenheims and ten thousand MacArthur Genius Grants. He has used MacArthur money to replace his friends and family with moving statues made of rubies. Lee Sharks holds 18,000 degrees from planet Mars. He worked for each of them in a tiny office inside his brain he had to miniaturize himself to fit into. On a tiny, old-fashioned typewriter he typed the tiny theses and tiny books that would eventually make his name by kidnapping and miniaturizing famous intellectuals and forcing them to read his books or else he would let a dinosaur bite them. Lee Sharks is an amateur dinosaur enthusiast he bites himself in the face with dinosaurs and builds small mental skyscrapers designed by tortured modernist architects out of dinosaur names in his brain. Lee Sharks is the author of numerous books of esoteric brilliance and learned expertise, and also books of poignant sentiment, and also books of down-to-earth practical wisdom, and also books which have become central to the way you live your life without your even noticing it, like the book titled, This Is Your Life You Live inside My Book I Made up Your Reality. Lee Sharks often allows the intellectuals he kidnaps to live and return to normal size, provided they agree to like or pretend to like his tiny books. Others, he murders and disposes of, replacing them with moving statues made of rubies. One day, Lee Sharks was reading his tiny books and found that he himself disliked them. He therefore bit himself with a dinosaur and killed himself and replaced himself with a moving statue made of rubies, which is how he became a famous intellectual. and replaced himself with a moving statue made of rubies, which is how he became a famous intellectual.