BETALEVEL

Stan Apps is a poet and essayist from Los Angeles. He is the author of Info Ration (Make Now Press) and soft hands (Ugly Duckling Presse). Other books are forthcoming from Cy Press, Les Figues Press, and Combo Books. Stan has published work in journals with silly names like Greetings, PomPom, Trepan, Jacket, and Mirage/Periodical. A previous neo-Benshi piece, “Gooooaaalll!!!” was written and performed collaboratively with Matt Timmons.

Sean Deyoe is an L.A.-based designer, writer, and artist. He is a co-organizer of Betalevel and produces solo work under the name The Royal Academy of Nuts + Bolts.

Anne Frost was born in Oakland, CA and still lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her MFA from Mills College in 1998. Her chapbook “Ceteris Paribus=All Things Being Equal” was published by Incidental Press in 2000. It included a collection of poems inspired by and about several modernist women artists and writers. Her play “Divert”, about puberty and friendship splits, was performed in Berkeley in 2001. Since then, she has been writing and revising 1. a collection of stories about her travels, tentatively called “Men” in a half-hearted rebuttal to Bukowski’s “Women” and 2. a play about a divorced woman struggling with a mother who has Alzheimer’s. She currently teaches 7th and 8th grade at a Berkeley middle school, which makes it a challenge for her to write and revise with any semblance of efficiency. She also likes to paint and cook desserts.

Summi Kaipa has authored several chapbooks, including “The Epics” (Leroy Press), “One: I Beg You Be Still” (Belladonna), and most recently “The Language Parable” (Corollary Press). For eight years, she was the editor of Interlope, a magazine publishing innovative writing by Asian Americans, and in 2002, she received a Potrero Nuevo Fund Prize to write and produce her first play. Once a resident of SF’s bustling Mission District, Kaipa now resides in a quiet neighborhood in North Berkeley, where she studies for a doctorate in psychology, cooks delicious meals, and makes slow progress on her first full-length manuscript. Occasionally, she emerges from her shell to charm friends and admirers with a benshi or a reading.