MINTON

A WILDLY ORIGINAL SPOKEN WORD ARTIST, NOVELIST, TEACHER AND ESSAYIST, Minton Sparks was born in a Tennessee college town and raised among her Southern family in and around Arkansas. Her Spoken Word appearances range from the prestigious Jonesborough National Storytelling Festival all the way to the American Songbook Series at Lincoln Center in New York City, and she recently made a rare spoken word debut at the Grand Ole Opry. She has opened for such totemic souls as John Prine, Nanci Griffith, Rodney Crowell, Punch Brothers, Indigo Girls, and Ben Folds. In 2019, The Fellowship of Southern Writers recognized Minton with their first ever Spoken-Word Award, presented to her by novelist Dorothy Allison.

Minton’s books, Desperate Ransom and White Lightning, and her writing have received wide acclaim from NPR’s Weekend Edition and BBC’s Bob Harris Show. Her performances have captivated audiences across the United States and Europe. Minton’s debut recording on Dualtone Records included a vocal appearance by the legendary Waylon Jennings. Her second recording, This Dress featured a performance by the phenomenal bluesman, Keb Mo’. Her fifth record, Where Humans End and Birds Begin, will be released in June of 2023.

Minton writes songs that aren’t songs, poems that aren’t poems, draws the shape of herself amid grungy percussion, humid guitar, electric murmurs beyond location.

There’s a wild-eyed thing in the middle of what she makes. There’s pain in what she talks about, and so at first you figure that wild-eyed thing is her characters’ pain—girls like bruises on the body of Christ, whipped by bible-thumping mothers, watching their twins drown, tied to stoves. In the middle of a live performance you realize the wild-eyed thing in the middle of what Minton makes is the restless life force of her.

Minton Sparks founded the Nashville Writing and Performance Institute to draw students further into their own stories. In the summer of 2022 she taught her writing workshop, Create Your Story, in both Spain and Portugal.

In December of 2022, Minton, along with ACME Feed and Seed, launched the inaugural Minton Sparks’ Spoken Word and Poetry Festival in Nashville, TN. The 3-day festival featured performances by Minton and other world-class artists and writers including Derrick Brown, Alora Young, JoJo Hermann from Widespread Panic, and Lonnie Holley.

Imagine, if you will, Flannery O'Connor and the ghost of Hank Williams having an affair that results in the birth of an illegitimate child . . . . I have seen Minton Sparks. And if she’s not the ghost child of the woman who wrote Wise Blood and the man who sang “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive,” then cotton doesn’t grow in a cotton field.

— Marshall Chapman, Garden & Gun Magazine