ABOUT JAKE
Jake Zimkiewicz is a writer, filmmaker, and multidisciplinary storyteller whose work explores memory, grief, queerness, faith, and the quiet violence of inheritance. Raised between Massachusetts and Florida, his creative voice is shaped by the friction between place and past—New England’s emotional restraint colliding with the heat, sprawl, and mythos of the American South. His work often occupies the liminal space between autobiography and folklore, rendering personal history through mythic, sometimes unsettling lenses.
Zimkiewicz first gained recognition through long-form, narrative-driven creative projects that blended confessional writing with surreal and Southern Gothic influences. His literary debut, LOVECAT, released during the COVID-19 pandemic, established a voice that is intimate, lyrical, and unflinchingly vulnerable. The collection examines desire, devotion, bodily intimacy, and emotional obsession with a tone that oscillates between tenderness and brutality. His forthcoming collection, BLEEDER, sharpens these themes, interrogating power, inheritance, autonomy, and the lingering haunt of the human condition.
His fiction expands these concerns into fully realized narrative worlds. The novella BLOODHOUND is set within a fictionalized North Florida landscape and follows deeply interior queer characters navigating repression, longing, and self-discovery. Drawing from Southern Gothic traditions, the work foregrounds atmosphere and psychological tension over plot, using setting as a living force that shapes its characters’ inner lives. Across his prose, Zimkiewicz frequently returns to rural and semi-forgotten towns—places where faith, fear, and silence coexist, and where what goes unspoken often carries the most weight.
Storytelling, for Zimkiewicz, is cumulative rather than singular. Characters, locations, and emotional motifs recur across projects, forming a loosely interconnected narrative universe that spans poetry, prose, and visual work. These repetitions act less as continuity than as echo—suggesting that memory itself is circular, and that certain stories demand to be told again and again from different angles.
In addition to his literary work, Zimkiewicz is the co-founder of Happy Accident TV, a production collective created alongside collaborator April Calla. The project evolved from a single podcast into a platform for scripted, long-form visual storytelling, including comedy series, seasonal specials, and experimental narrative work. Their approach favors intimacy and character over polish, drawing inspiration from public-access television, DIY filmmaking, and the emotional immediacy of low-budget production.
Zimkiewicz’s creative practice is defined by obsessive attention to detail and a belief in art as an immersive experience. Visual design, typography, physical artifacts, and supplemental ephemera are treated as extensions of narrative rather than promotion—objects that carry emotional residue and invite touch, ritual, and memory.
At the center of Jake Zimkiewicz’s work is an enduring preoccupation with preservation: of people, of places, of moments that threaten to disappear with time. Whether through poetry, fiction, or visual storytelling, his work asks what survives us—and what we are doomed to carry long after we believe we’ve left it behind.
