This interview has not been tagged for content advisory yet.
Andrea Jenkins is an artist, activist, and poet, as well as the first out Black transgender woman elected to American public office. She was born and raised in Chicago, where she was raised by a single mom, grandparents, aunts and uncles. She was an athletic kid who loved playing outside and being in Cub Scouts. Andrea remembers being engaged with her gender from a young age: cross-dressing at 4, and feeling deep fascination (and internalized homophobia) at the sight of drag queens on a bus as a 10-year-old. Andrea tried to use her athleticism to affirm her birth gender, playing on the football team and joining ROTC, but remembers that “the internal feelings of femininity were overpowering.”
Poetry has been a powerful throughline in Andrea’s life. She met Gwendolyn Brooks in first grade, when Brooks was the Poet Laureate of Illinois. On her classroom visit, Brooks told the young Andrea, “Anybody can be a poet. You all can be poets,” an idea that thrummed unused in Andrea’s head until she was 14, when she wrote her first poem. When she left for college at the University of Minnesota in 1979, she got her poems published for the first time, and won prizes for them.
Her journey to her gender identity converged with her evolution as a poet when she began going to queer and trans slam poetry spaces in Minneapolis in her 20s. By the time she turned 30, she began to transition. She finished her undergrad degree in 1999 at Metropolitan State University, and has two Master’s degrees, an MFA in creative writing from Hamline University and an MS in community economic development from Southern New Hampshire University.
Andrea’s political career began in 2001, when Robert Lilligren hired her to be part of his City Council campaign. She worked on his staff for four years, and built a wide-ranging network that led to Minneapolis Councilmember Elizabeth Glidden hiring Andrea in 2005. Andrea used her time in Glidden’s office to start the Transgender Issues Work group in 2014. That same year, she also organized a summit focusing on the issues faced by the trans community of Minnesota. At the time of her OUTWORDS interview, Minnesota was about to celebrate the tenth of these summits.
In 2015, Andrea started her work at the University of Minnesota’s Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies, where she curates the Transgender Oral History Project (TOHP) to this day. She’s interviewed almost 200 people, emphasizing the depth and breadth of the trans experience across the archive.
Andrea has always been aware that Minneapolis is a city affected profoundly by racial inequality, a fact that drove her to run for city council in 2017. She won her seat with more than 70% of the vote. In 2021, she was reelected, and she was unanimously voted to the office of City Council President in 2022. As a Councilmember, she created a Racial Equity Community Advisory Committee. She’s also proud to have created an arts department in the city of Minneapolis, something that never existed before, and has brought in a Poet Laureate.
She lives in Minneapolis, where she sits on the board of Advocates for Transgender Equality, and spends time with her grandchildren.
