The fast bio:

Alex Green was born at Marin General Hospital. He's still alive and stuff.

The bio that ends in a question:

A native of California, Alex Green got his MFA at St. Mary's College and started his writing career as a music critic.

Or did he?

The bio that's written in the form of a George Carlin bit:

"The very existence of flamethrowers proves that sometime, somewhere, someone said to themselves, “You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.”

The bio that's totally a lie:

On the strength of his 1984 performance as Gene Goldberg, Ricky's "special" friend on Silver Spoons, as a precocious fourteen-year-old, Alex Green was voted by Tiger Beat as America's Favorite Teen. Leaving network television behind a year later, the California native went to Broadway, where his performance as King Lear was hailed by The New Yorker as, "Revelatory and intuitive, a stunning display of theatrical precision and textual interpretation. And a reminder that Lear need not always be old."

Turning down Stanford, UCLA and Sonoma State, Alex jumped countries to attend Oxford, where he majored in Literature, and, as he once put it, "minored in life." After graduating with honors, he signed a deal with Harper Collins and soon released I Carry The Globe, a searing tome that was an achingly accurate portrait of Australian politics, stock market corruption, the death of Jai-Lai champion Sir. Edmund Gramble and the rise of the rock band Cold Chisel. Set against the backdrop of the 1979 Sydney Rocks Festival, The New York Times declared the novel to be, "A tireless, altogether riveting exploration of the human psyche and man's inevitable fate told with courage, heart and world-weary smarts."  

Alex spent the '90s evading calls from the MacArthur Foundation, who wanted to award him a Genius Grant for his unpublished manuscript of poems entitled: This Is The Night, These Are The People Who Will Kill You. "His pager was blowing up every few minutes," his friend Liz Phair recalls. "It was a constant chorus."

By 2006 Alex was teaching at Boston University and working part-time as a lifeguard. He memorialized this daily dichotomy in a piece that ran in The Paris Review called "Adjunct In A Speedo."

Perhaps during those cold days on the stand, watching the blue pool turn to ice is where the poems that would end up in Emergency Anthems were born.

Or maybe not. There’s a good chance he was listening to obscure thrash metal from Norway and literally thinking about nothing.

The bio that comments on the bio that's totally a lie:

That bio that's totally a lie is totally true.

The bio that takes itself way too seriously:

A two-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize in Poetry, Alex Green's work has appeared in RHINO, The Canary, the Mid-American Review and Barrow Street. A native of California, he is the author of The Adventure Teen All-Stars (Embers Arts, 2023), Malraux and the Midnight Organ Fight (Embers Arts, 2020), The Heart Goes Boom (Wrecking Ball, UK 2017), Emergency Anthems (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2014), Let The West Coast Be Settled (Tall Lighthouse, 2013) and The Stone Roses (Bloomsbury Academic, 2006).

He currently teaches English at St. Mary's College of California and is the host of the weekly podcast Stereo Embers The Podcast (IG: @emberspodcast) and the Editor of Stereo Embers Magazine (www.stereoembersmagazine.com.

The bio that critiques the bio that takes itself way too seriously:

Unless it was an Oscar or the presidency, it's weird to open with being a nominee for anything. What he really means is, "I lost at something. Twice." Never heard of those magazines, by the way (is RHINO an acronym? And good heavens, for what?). A native of California? Something tells me that translates to: low S.A.T. scores. He may be the author of The Stone Roses, but there weren't many buyers. We checked the numbers. St. Mary's College of California is a lovely school, but after sitting in on one of his classes, I think "teaching" is a massive overstatement. There isn’t a lecture hall large enough for those ego needs. Oh, and I checked out Stereo Embers Magazine. Blech. Unless you really care about what Blues Traveler is up to these days. 

The bio that pretty much just pulls a quote from a review somebody wrote about Alex on Goodreads:

"I read his first book and pretty much hated it...I can't believe this guy teaches college..."

The bio that was written by an ex-girlfriend:

Egotistical, emotionally remote, self-referential, preoccupied, voicemail is always full, takes himself way too seriously, thinks he's really funny, talks about his cat too much, makes you listen to awful music, references Lucretius but has never read him, dull, self-obsessed...too eighties.

The bio that's best rendered in song:

Lifter+Puller--"Mission Viejo"

The bio that's in the form of a prose poem that wasn't good enough for the book:

It began with a heatwave, a drowning, a burning boat and a guitar player with a broken arm stealing somebody's girlfriend. Or maybe it ended that way. No matter what the order, you remember marveling at how swiftly terrible things moved. The winter was hellish because there wasn't one. Everyone stood around squinting under the sun with a new understanding of Stone Age sorrow.  At night the bats moved in spasms of applause, the blue wolf glided through the dark veins of the city and nobody saw the Captain swinging an axe across what was left of his ship until it was too late. 

The bio that comments on the bio above:

Again, massive ego needs.