JORN AKE began as a painter, graduating from the College of William and Mary with a BA in fine arts. Ten years later, he moved to Arizona to complete an MFA in creative writing at Arizona State University. His first collection of poems, Asleep in the Lightning Fields, won the 2001 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize and was published by Texas Review Press in 2002. Popular Ink released a chapbook of his work, All About the Blind Spot and Other Poems, in 2007, and his second full-length collection, The Circle Line, is forthcoming from The Backwaters Press. He began writing Boys Whistling like Canaries in Prague, where he lived for three years. He currently lives in New York City.