A vibrant, passionate, and heartfelt spoken word artist and writer, Opalina Herebia-Salas harbors the ambition of one day traveling across the U.S. on the open mic circuit, taking part in and contributing to the collective experience shared by all practitioners of the spoken word. To that end, she continues to pursue her art at every opportunity, having become a familiar and well recognized presence in the local literary community since finding her muse in 1995. Included among the venues she has been known to frequent are The Green Room, Rock n Java, Zombies, Café Society, The Donut Lady, and the monthly Mad Swirl open mic hosted by Johnny O at the Absinthe Lounge. As a co-founder of DFW Open Mics, Opalina has been a regular host or co-host at many of the aforementioned venues, as well as a guest interviewee on Mandrake Society Radio in 2007. In 2008, she was one of three featured readers at the ROAR! poetry reading at Paperbacks Plus, where she appeared alongside fellow local luminaries Desmene Statum and Jolee Davis-Cloudy.

Opalina’s work has been featured online, as well as in a number of literary zines and other print publications. Her publishers have included Death List Five, Literary Tonic, Zombie Book Press, and Johnny O’s Mad Swirl, as well as her own Propinquity Press. Rattling Keys and Broken Chords, her fifth and the most recent of her poetry chapbooks, was published in 2007.

Born and raised in Texas, Opalina is married to poet and artist Carlos Salas, with whom she has one daughter, and (with Carlos) owner and operator of the Cliff Notes Prolonged Media bookstore in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas. She is active as a painter and craftswoman and is currently at work on a novel.