Poet, journalist, and musician Jack Skelley is the author of Monsters, Dennis Wilson and Charlie Manson, and the forthcoming Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing. During the years when Fear of Kathy Acker was written, Skelley produced the music series and coproduced the reading and performance series at Beyond Baroque while editing and publishing Barney: The Modern Stone Age Magazine, featuring major artists and writers. He is a songwriter and guitarist for the psychedelic surf band Lawndale.
Sabrina Tarasoff is an independent writer and critic formerly based in Pasadena and now in Paris. In recent years she has focused on the nebulous “poet gang” that formed around the poetry workshops at Beyond Baroque Literary Art Center during the period from 1976 to 1986. Founded in the early 1960s by George Drury Smith in a storefront in Venice, California, Beyond Baroque quickly became a site for gathering, workshopping writing, art performances, and conversation and is still active today.
