Jorn Ake graduated from the College of William and Mary with a BA in Fine Arts and then worked as a painter for ten years, before moving 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 2003, he was awarded an Arizona Commission on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. Popular Ink published a chapbook of his work, All About the Blind Spot and Other Poems, in 2007. His third book, Boys Whistling like Canaries, won the 2008 Blue Lynx Prize and was published by Eastern Washington University Press. He currently lives in New York City.