The recovered 2014 comic contributor biography from Pearl and Other Poems, retroactively read in 2026 as About the Author I. Its extravagant claims—thousands of awards and degrees, impossible acts, statues, and dinosaur encounters—are fictional literary prose, not factual biography. The original and later titles, as well as the two surviving closing variants, should remain documented.
# About the Author I -
_From the front matter of_ Pearl and Other Poems _by Lee Sharks (2014, ISBN 978-0692313077), page xix._
_Originally titled "Contributor Bio"; retroactively renamed "About the Author" by the corpus in 2026 as the founding text of the sequence (I), with_ About the Author II _and_ III _as continuations. The disjoint is documented, not erased._
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 10,000 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.
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.
One day, Lee Sharks was reading his tiny books and found that he himself disliked them. He therefore bit himself with a dinosaur and replaced himself with a moving statue made of rubies, which is how he became a famous astronaut.
## Variant Closing
The 2014 print edition closes with _famous astronaut_. A later variant closes with _famous intellectual_. The author allows the text to remain fluid at the closing. Both endings exist; both are accurate to a state of the text; neither is privileged.
## Provenance
* Author: Lee Sharks (ORCID 0009-0000-1599-0703)
* Original publication: _Pearl and Other Poems_ (2014, ISBN 978-0692313077), p. xix
* Original title: Contributor Bio
* Cover artist of the parent volume: Tao Lin (mandala, taolin.us/mandalas; attribution returned in _About the Author III_ §X)
* Restored / deposited: 2026-05-25, Detroit, Michigan
* Canonical surface: https://leesharks.com/about-the-author/
* Continuation I: _About the Author II_ (https://leesharks.com/about-the-author-ii/)
* Continuation II: _About the Author III_ (https://leesharks.com/about-the-author-iii/)
* Field-scale parent of the sequence: _Semantic Physics: A Stratified, Operative Discipline_ (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20208384), semanticphysics.org
∮ = 1 − PER