Minton Sparks fuses music, poetry and intoxicating storytelling into a category that is all her own. Her books include, Desperate Ransom: Setting Her Family Free, and White Lightning. Her spoken word CDs include, Middlin’ Sisters (2001), This Dress (2003), and Sin Sick (2005). Her DVD Open Casket, features sixteen of Sparks’ best-known pieces, including, “Vickie Pickle’s Momma” (“If the heart won’t break, the mind will shatter it into a million pieces”); “Ambulance Chaser” (“Highway 50 fights us like a wet cat locked in a dollhouse”); and “Ghosted” (“He’d made a ghost of her, staring straight through her at the TV, nursing Buds, acting in public like he didn’t know who on earth she was.”) Marshall Chapman, writing in Garden and Gun magazine, speculates that Sparks could very well be the offspring of Flannery O’Connor and Hank Williams: “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.”