About the Author I is the restored contributor biography from the front matter of Pearl and Other Poems.
The text originally appeared in 2014 under the heading “Contributor Bio.” In 2026 the Archive reread and retitled it as the first work in the About the Author sequence. The later title is an operative reception of the earlier paratext rather than the original printed heading.
The piece adopts the form of an author biography and fills it with escalating impossibilities. Lee Sharks is credited with fourteen Guggenheim Fellowships, ten thousand MacArthur Genius Grants, eighteen thousand degrees from universities on Mars, ruby statues, intellectual kidnappings, murders, and an encounter with a dinosaur. The claims are deliberately absurd and belong to the work’s comic literary construction.
Two variant closing sentences survive, one identifying Sharks as a famous astronaut and one as a famous intellectual. Neither variant should be silently privileged without reference to the source edition.
The work anticipated a later retrieval problem: machine systems can detach claims from genre and present fictional paratext as factual biography. The About the Author sequence subsequently makes that misreading part of its subject.