A jazz writer with over 150 articles to his credit--Down Beat, JazzTimes, Modern Drummer, Jazz Notes, Coda (Canada), Swing Journal (Japan), Jazz Forum (Poland), The Christian Science Monitor, The Massachusetts Review, West--Bill has also published three books on music:

• Unzipped Souls: A Jazz Journey Through the Soviet Union (Temple University Press)
• Jazz Journeys to Japan: The Heart Within (University of Michigan Press, 2004)
• Monterey Jazz Festival: Forty Legendary Years (Angel City Press. He served as scriptwriter for the Warner Bros. film documentary, same title as book).

His jazz writing has also appeared online: jazzhouse.org, jazzinstituteofchicago.org, jazzwest.com, kyotojournal.org/10,000things.

Bill has read his own work in several genres (including translations from Modern Greek, Russian and Japanese) and discussed jazz on a number of radio stations, including KRML (Carmel, CA), KAZU (Pacific Grove, CA), KIDD (Magic 63, Monterey, CA), KUSP (Santa Cruz, CA), KJAZ (San Francisco, CA), KCSM (San Mateo, CA), KKUP (Cupertino, CA), KJAZZ (Long Beach, CA), KSDS (San Diego, CA), WBGO (Newark, NJ), WHRB (Harvard Radio), NPR ("In Search of Soviet Jazz: Bill Minor's 1990 Summer Odyssey"), VOA (Voice of America, Washington D.C.), and CNN (on the Monterey Jazz Festival).

Bill Minor spent thirty-two years as an educator at the University of Hawaii (1963-1965), Wisconsin State University-Whitewater (1966-1971), and Monterey Peninsula College (1971-1996); and taught every humanities-related course from Creative Writing to American Humor and Comedy to Soviet Russian Literature.

A professional musician since the age of sixteen (piano, drums, tenor guitar, vocals), Bill has released three CDs : the first Bill Minor & Friends: For Women Missing or Dead, Poems Set to Music, the second (spoken word and original music) Mortality Suite. A CD Release Party performance of Mortality Suite (featuring Bill on piano, Heath Proskin on bass, Richard Mayer on flute, and actor Taelen Thomas as "voice") can be found at: Live Networks. This performance may also be found and downloaded at Vimeo. Eight poems from this CD (with MP3 readings, original music and art work, and Bill on piano) can be found on Beau Blue Presents: Bill Minor's Mortality Suite: A Broadside of Jazz Riffs along with a Flash Animation reading of "Dreaming Sandra Bullock," in The Green Room section of Blue's Cruzio Cafe.

Bill has a third, and new CD, available: Love Letters of Lynchburg--work commissioned and distributed by the Historic Sandusky Foundation of Lynchburg, Virginia. This spoken word/original music CD features an exchange of letters between Charles Minor Blackford (Bill's great grandfather's first cousin's son) and his remarkable wife Susan throughout the Civil War. The commission included preparing a voice script (from two published volumes of letters exchanged) and an original score of music to serve as background. The CD features actors Taelen Thomas and Kathryn Petruccelli (as Charles and Susan) and music provided by Bill (piano), Heath Proskin (bass) and Richard Mayer (flute). A CD Release Party was held at the Pacific Grove Art Center in Pacific Grove, California on August 15, 2010--an event that included a full performance of the work by the complete CD "cast." Two more performances are scheduled for spring and early summer (to be announced shortly).

Richard Mayer and Bill Minor can be heard and seen playing "Lover Man" on Richard's website (scroll down to "YouTube: Bill Minor and Richard Mayer Play Lover Man").

Bill Minor's latest published work is a novel, Trek: Lips, Sunny, Pecker and Me (Park Place Publications, October 2007), for which he received the 1999 best "First Chapter of a Novel" award from the Friends of the Sacramento Public Library and Focus on Writers Committee. He is completing an hundred tanka cycle called The Delights of Age and The Inherited Heart, a memoir project.