Prickly Pear Printing is dedicated to highlighting written and visual work with a focus on growth, beauty, and the celebration of bodies and narratives often silenced.
We hope to capture stories to sustain us in what is often an inhospitable world.
We seek to bring the insistence of the body to the page in ways that combine traditional letterpress with digital printing methods.
Our journey to become a press...
Prickly Pear Printing is the culmination of a friendship and creative connection between queer poets: Nico Wilkinson and Joy Young. After many conversations around how beautiful it is to hear poems that manage to move through and/or beyond trauma, how we sometimes feel pressured to perform our traumas rather than express a full range of truth in our poems, and how we both return home to poetry scenes in cities that are politically purple (leaning more conservative), we decided to create a platform to publish work that sustains us as we work toward social justice and building platforms to amplify many voices in our home cities.
We fell in love with one another's poems about love, friendship, hope, and growth. These are the things we struggle to hold close and hope to make tangible for ourselves and others who may need it.
Editors
Joy Young
Joy is a performance and teaching artist living in Phoenix, Az. When not partaking in circus shenanigans, cooking delicious dinners, or taking pictures of their dog, Joy facilitates workshops on poetry and storytelling with a focus on identity and restorative justice.
Nico Wilkinson
Nico Wilkinson is a poet and organizer in Colorado Springs. They facilitate The Quaill Club, an intentional community for queer artists that is full of love and light and many animals, and they run an open mic called Keep Colorado Springs Queer. They like many things alongside poetry, such as farming, making books and giving tarot readings.