Ballard, Fenner, + Opstedal

Kevin Opstedal was Born and raised in Venice, California, and currently residing in Santa Cruz, Kevin Opstedal is a poet whose line leaves three decades of roadcuts across the entire imaginary West. His twenty-five books and chapbooks include two full-length collections, Like Rain (Angry Dog Press, 1999) and California Redemption Value (UNO Press, 2011). Blue Books Press, one of many of his “sub-radar” editorships, belongs in the same breath as the great California poetry houses (Auerhahn, Big Sky, Oyez) that his own poems seem to conjure like airbrushed flames on a murdered-out junker carrying Ed Dorn, Joanne Kyger, Ted Berrigan, and some wide-eyed poetry neophyte to a latenite card game in Bolinas. “His poems,” writes Lewis MacAdams, “are hard-nosed without being hard-hearted.” As identity and ideas duke it out in the back-alley of academia, Opstedal surfs an oil slick off Malibu into the apocalypse of style.

Derek Fenner is an artist, educator, and researcher living in Oakland, California. He earned his MFA in writing and poetics at Naropa University. After a decade of experience as an art educator in the juvenile justice system, he is completing his Doctorate in education at Mills College. His latest book of poetry is Hermeticities & Others (2016) published by Bootstrap Press, a publishing company he co-founded in 2000.

Micah Ballard is the author of over a dozen books of poetry, including Vesper Chimes (Gas Meter, 2014), Waifs and Strays (City Lights Books, 2011), Parish Krewes (Bootstrap Press, 2009), Evangeline Downs (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006), and Negative Capability in the Verse of John Wieners (Auguste Press, 2001), as well as the collaborations Death Race V.S.O.P (with Cedar Sigo & Will Yackulic), Easy Eden (with Patrick James Dunagan), and Poems from the New Winter Palace (with Michael Carr). His third full-length collection, Afterlives, was just released by Bootstrap Press. He works at the University of San Francisco and with Sunnylyn Thibodeaux is the co-editor of Auguste Press and Lew Gallery Editions.