One column text overlapping two-column text on chapter title page

Question

I'm autogenerating a book using pandoc, meaning pandoc parses markdown-formatted text and runs it through xelatex with it's own template. I have a problem where I need to have a short text after the chapter title in one column before starting the two-column main text. Because of pandoc-induced limitations, I can't use multicol. Instead the document is a twocolumn-memoir.

Currently, I use minipage to set the text after the chapter heading, but I am having a problem where the second column is overlapping the minipage instead of starting after the minipage like the first column.

A suggested solution requires defining the first paragraph before the chapter heading, which messes up how pandoc handles the text. Is there a way to fix the problem some other way? The solution doesn't need to use minipage, but pandoc limits some options because of how it parses text.

A minimal example of how I currently generate the text:

\documentclass[landscape,twocolumn,oneside,12pt]{memoir}
\begin{document}

\chapter{Chapter Title}

\begin{minipage}[c]{\textwidth}
\centering
Author info
with several lines of
text
\end{minipage}

\subsubsection{Left column}
Left column text which is usually much longer than this example.

\vfill\break % break text to next column

\subsubsection{Right column}
Right column also usually has a much longer text.

\clearpage

Answer 1

You can use the strip environment, from cuted (sttools bundle). The envirronment inserts at the beginning and end a vertical spacing of \stripsep (default: 15pt±2pt):

\documentclass[landscape,twocolumn,oneside,12pt]{memoir}

\usepackage{cuted}

\begin{document}

\chapter{Chapter Title}

\begin{strip}%
\centering
Author info
with several lines of
text\vspace{6ex}
\end{strip}
\subsubsection{Left column}
Left column text which is usually much longer than this example.

\vfill\break % break text to next column

\subsubsection{Right column}
Right column also usually has a much longer text.

\clearpage

\end{document}