Julian Vale

Keep it truthful and short; it has to match the two-line bio in the book, and an author page that says more than the book does is where a pen name gets caught.

Julian Vale writes under a pen name.

His debut collection, Flinch, is 108 poems about gay men and what the body keeps after the danger is gone: the voice fixed at twelve, the hand that lets go on an empty street, the curtains nobody remembers deciding to leave open. It is not a book about coming out. It is a book about everything after.

That's it. It gives the reader the book, the handle, and nothing to disprove. Don't add a city, an age, a husband, or a childhood; every one of those is a fact someone can ask about, and the answer is that there isn't one.