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Jesse Minkert

Jesse Minkert’s work has appeared in about fifty literary journals including the Cream City Review, Confrontation, Mount Hope, the Floating Bridge Review, the Minetta Review, Poetry Northwest, Common Knowledge, and Harpur Palate. Thanks to Raven Chronicles, he is a 2016 Pushcart Nominee. Over twenty years he has written about fifty short radio stories that were performed and produced by blind and visually impaired young people in the Blind Youth Audio Project, and many short pieces for the Jack Straw New Media Gallery workshops, in collaborations between Jack Straw and Arts and Visually Impaired Audiences.

Minkert has collected a wide variety of experiences from the art world and the real world which have made him the writer he is now. His training in the visual arts is the source of his approach to form and design in literature. He has a BFA as a painter and an MA as a sculptor. His work has been displayed in galleries and shows in Houston, Carmel, Humboldt County, and Seattle. He has created many objects in wood, including a six-foot sperm whale from a single piece of western red cedar, which hangs from the ceiling of the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor, Washington. He has been a picture framer, sign maker, hot tub maker, cabinet maker, radio theater producer, and art shipping specialist for galleries and museums.

He founded the nonprofit corporation, Arts and Visually Impaired Audiences, which has provided arts access for blind and visually impaired people in Washington State since 1991. In that capacity he has kept books, designed programs, written and administered grants, served as a consultant to arts organizations on accessibility issues, and trained access providers. He ran the Audio Description Service in Seattle, coordinated around 700 live descriptions of theatrical productions, trained describers, described about 160 performances himself, and conducted descriptive tours of exhibits such as the King Tut exhibition, the MoPoP Guitar Gallery, and the Olympic Sculpture Park. He wrote upwards of 600 preshow descriptions of sets and characters for plays. He wrote and recorded descriptive tracks for art videos and access training videos. His theatrical plays and radio plays have won awards. Decades of living with Type 1 diabetes have led Minkert to address in his work themes of health and the body. In 1981, diabetic retinopathy threatened to take away his vision. This critical moment helped him to decide to commit less to the visual arts and to focus his creative efforts on writing.

New Media Gallery 1999 (with Susie Kozawa): Nearly Seen, Closely Heard