William Walrond Strangmeyer was born in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1945 and grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he went to Rutgers University, studying classics, music and psychology, on which he declined to follow up or to practice. He has worked in many different fields of endeavor, including amusement parks, banks, book stores, cinema, door-to-door sales (like Abbott and Costello), poker games, restaurants, taxi driving and warehouses. A forty-five-year resident of Paris, he now earns his living as an English language trainer and translator. He is the former co-editor of Upstairs at Duroc. He is the author of several volumes of poetry (all slim) and has given readings too endemic to cite around Paris, but also in the States. His other principal interests are various forms of combat sports and old music (doo-wop, Gregorian chant, hippie music, Czerny). He is Archon of Paris for the Moorish Orthodox Church and a member of various other organizations embracing a few essential beliefs and having even fewer doctrines and eschews the party of Evil.