Suzanne Allen is an artist and writing teacher born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley near Los Angeles. In the middle of a whirlwind career in interior design in her twenties, she had a house fire, which led her back to college where she studied French, then writing, then ran away to Paris several times before finally completing an MFA in Poetry on her 37th birthday. She then followed love back to Paris, as one does, and then a few years later, dragged her heartbreak home to Long Beach—writing, publishing, and editing all the way. Her poems appear widely in print and online journals, and among other projects, she served as a coeditor for the The Bastille: The Literary Magazine of Spoken Word Paris. Her first full-length collection, We Wash Our Hands, is a self-published accidental memoir of the first year of the COVID lockdown, and this is how her Paris poems became a prequel called Awkward. It had simmered for a decade, and though all these years later she mostly stays put, she still never knows if she’s coming or going, only that she’s lucky, and grateful, and craves sleep.

David Barnes has been reading his poems aloud in Paris bars since 2003. The best of them were published last year as Poets Are Liars Who Tell The Truth (corrupt press) after extensive road-testing at the weekly open mic and writers’ community he fathered, Spoken Word Paris. Poems that bite, such as ‘Bitter Valentine’, love poems, fun poems, poems about Paris ‘who dances by numbers but longs to release jazz…’ and poems that dive into dark waters – the ties of love and suffering that bind him to family back in England, where everyone haunted their own lives. Born Reading, 1971.