Jeff Encke was born in Pittsburgh in 1971 and raised in Seattle with his three younger brothers and sister, never more than a stone’s throw from the Puget Sound. He began college with plans to become a mathematician and film-maker, but left a fledgling poet, graduating from Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT) in 1993. Faced with the options of pursuing an MFA in poetry or PhD in English, he chose the latter, moving to New York and eventually completing his doctorate at Columbia University, where he served as writer-in-residence in the Program in Narrative Medicine in 2002. Encke is currently at work on several books, including two full-length collections of verse, Most Wanted, from which he excerpted this deck of poetry playing cards, and Hydrography, a volume of water-related poems; two chapbooks, Sinking and Eunuch Shower Song, the second of which C.D. Wright selected as runner-up in the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural National Chapbook Fellowship competition; a revision of his doctoral thesis, Manifestos: A Social History of Proclamation; a study of the influence of technological innovation on the production and reception of art, Rogue Magic; an anthology of manifestos; and a translation from the Italian of Paolo Baglione, an unfinished play by Futurist poet F.T. Marinetti. His poetry has appeared in various national journals, including American Writing, Barrow Street, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Cream City Review, Fence, Octopus, Salt Hill, 3rd Bed, and Quarterly West. Encke also writes literary criticism, with work on John Ashbery, Charles Bukowski, Sam Hamill, and James Schuyler either appearing in or forthcoming from Post-War Literatures in English, The Journal of American Studies, A Companion to 20th Century American Poetry, and The Encyclopedia of New York School Poets, respectively. He has served as a research and teaching assistant to Robert Richardson, Steven Marcus, Edward Said, and Kenneth Koch; presented papers at the University of New Mexico, University of Vermont, and Harvard; and taught creative writing and criticism at both Columbia and Richard Hugo House in Seattle, where he currently resides.