Opal C McCarthy lives in Minneapolis, where she practices bodywork, teaches, performs, and creates community healing events to celebrate + induce fierce women's voices, radical tenderness, and reproductive freedom. Opal graduated from the MFA program at the University of Minnesota in 2011, and SURGE is her first book of poetry. Opal's poems and essays have appeared in alice blue review, La Petite Zine, dear camera, Invoke, The Pinch, and Midway Journal.