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Blue Cactus Press

An independent publishing house crafting books that serve as community resources, by collaborators from historically marginalized groups. We create books and open dialogue that move us toward liberation. Our catalog includes poetry, fiction, self-help, business, sociology, memoir, and anti-racism genres.

membership

Join our community of readers, writers, bookmakers, and bibliophiles seeking liberation through literature and community engagement! You’ll get books, ephemera, swag, early access to events, and letters from authors and staff. Membership ensures our publishing practices remain sustainable as we grow.

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books

Browse our books below, as well as some from like-minded presses and authors of the Pacific Northwest. Your purchase allows our collaborators — including authors, artists, designers, editors, marketers, and printers — to thrive.

Maps

3rd Edition Maps is the transmutation of Christina Vega’s debut poetry collection — and the book that started it all at Blue Cactus — Still Clutching Maps. First published in 2017, this pocket-sized poetry collection explores Vega’s cultural and geographic roots as a Chicana in the American Southwest. Vega sends readers down a path of memories, dreams, and warnings, asking them to witness the liminality of borderland existence. The poems in this collection, whether by omission, change, or preservation, illuminate Vega’s lived experiences as their queerness, cultural frameworks, and home drift toward and away from borderlands.

$20.00
Single-Parent Writing Workshop

Join storyteller, consultant, and poet Christina Vega for a generative writing workshop for single parents. Participants can expect to generate new writing, witness and share stories of transformation surrounding parenting and creativity, and engage in guided self-reflection exercises aimed at creative self-actualization. Participants will receive a workshop chapbook with guided writing exercises, poems and essays by local single-parent working writers, and coloring pages for moments of rest and relaxation.

Suggested price: $50.00

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Confessions of a Modern-Day Kumiho

by Alissa Tu Publication Date: Feb. 14th, 2022 Kumiho: A nine-tailed fox who transforms into a woman to seduce men and eat their livers or hearts. Sometimes, a man’s heart isn’t enough. As her inner Kumiho takes over, Alissa Tu is equal parts triumphant in conquest and terrifying in love’s inevitable collapse. Each attempt to satisfy the Kumiho entangles Alissa more deeply in her alter-ego’s devouring scheme. Can she reconcile with her animalistic counterpart, or will she remain forever bound and disembodied? This unapologetic memoir dissects— with bloody, fragmented incision—the shit-show of searching for love in our digital world.

$15.00 – $20.00

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A Summoning

Can we exorcise a memory? Can we purge those that are a danger to us? Rewriting moments of trauma while coming to terms with a family in the early stages of memory loss, A Summoning muddles the line between fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, text and image. Each segment is fragmented but fluid, weaving in and out to show how malleable and unreliable memory can be; how it manifests in the body, mentally, physically, emotionally; how it mutates and betrays as we age. A conceptual, psychological experiment focused on memory, Nicole McCarthy’s collection lays the groundwork explaining the physiology…

$20.00
You Are More Than Your Body

Published by Monique Ferrer Published Sep. 2022 There is no easy or correct way to process grief and loss. You Are More Than Your Body was created to help women that have experienced loss related to their body through insightful writing prompts and activities. This inviting journal is a space to reflect, process, and continue your healing journey. It’s time to make peace with our grief. This journal includes over 20 writing prompts related to grief and loss, affirmation activities, and more.

$20.00
Unearthing Our Roots

by Krista R. Pérez Publication Date: November 2022 Unearthing Our Roots is a call to action. Join author and community organizer Krista R. Pérez as she rallies advocates, activists, and leaders from historically marginalized groups to implement transformative and healing practices within their communities. Pérez calls readers in, asking us to unearth and uproot anti-Black, racist, ableist and biased values that fracture relationships in and surrounding our communities. With decades of lived experience and a multidisciplinary approach, Pérez presents guided journal prompts for examining intentions, strategies for unraveling harmful biases and behaviors, and transformative and restorative practices for communities of historically…

$15.00 – $20.00

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The Elephant in the Room

A business parable about race and equity conversations in the workplace by Philip “Sharp Skills” Jacobs Publication Date: October 29, 2022 Derek Blain is a young, up-and-coming Black executive hired to deliver the keynote speech at a corporate summit on equity. Things get… complicated. Derek experiences perilous death threats, mind-opening conversations, and unexpected microaggressions at the summit. He also discovers a new set of opportunities, hazards, and plain awkwardness surrounding racial conversations in the workplace. A parable in a power suit, The Elephant in the Room reckons with present-day workplace racism. The story provides opportunities for professionals to practice navigating…

$20.00

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Anatomy of My Mixed Body

Mainstream American culture asks us to label and define ourselves in clearly marked, rigid boxes. But definitions, meaning, and identity are always shifting. The only thing that lingers in their wake is the impact we, the meaning makers, have on the people and places we encounter. Anatomy of My Mixed Body is an eco-poetic conversation led by Katharine Threat, in which she addresses lived experiences of displacement and homecoming, and imagines a world in which seemingly disparate pieces of land and identity converge into one body. Threat’s poems demonstrate the possibility of reconciliation of the mixed body that is all…

$20.00
The Illuminated Space: A Personal Theory & Contemplative Practice of Media Art

by Marilyn Freeman Published by The 3rd Thing In this fragmentary and fluent little gem, writer and time-based artist Marilyn Freeman offers up their own contemplative practice of dowsing for and creating “opportune moments” of insight and healing. With humor and humility, Freeman reveals their innovative approach to making video essays, a process developed over years of art-making, study and personal searching—a process of waking up again and again to the extraordinary possibilities hidden in everyday existence.

$28.00