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 Top Ten Records in Oak Cliff. 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.
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 Mad Swirl, as well as her own Propinquity Press. Rattling Keys and Broken Chords, her fifth poetry chapbook, was published in 2007, and Black Sparrow Dress, a poetry collection described as "about recalling the past and letting go," was published in March 2019.
Born and raised in Texas, Opalina is married to poet and artist Carlos Salas, with whom she has one daughter, and (with Carlos) was 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.