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Blue Cactus Press

A grassroots publishing house crafting books that serve as community resources, by collaborators from historically marginalized groups. We create books that encourage community conversations and move us toward liberation.

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.

Difference and Survival

This short but impassioned speech by writer, radical feminist, and activist Audre Lorde is about self-actualization, the power of language, and what happens if we sit back and allow others to take charge of our stories. Originally delivered at a commencement ceremony for college graduates in the twentieth century, Difference and Survival returns to deliver the same life-changing message to today’s readers: the stories we tell ourselves have the power to change our lives. This is a limited edition, recycled, and handcrafted chapbook.

$10.00

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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
Less Desolate

Haiku by Shin Yu Pai & Comics by Justin Rueff Publication Date: November 11, 2023 Multidisciplinary artists Shin Yu Pai and Justin Rueff have created Less Desolate, a stunning haiku comics book exploring Pacific Northwest and pandemic life. Less Desolate represents an hybrid literary artform that brings together the lyricism and associative qualities of poetry, while also drawing from the craft of sequential art. Within its pages, Pai and Rueff uncover the quiet moments of calm that anchor us within urban surroundings, while also contemplating climate change, poverty, homelessness, loneliness, parenting and mental health during isolation and confinement. Less Desolate was fully…

$15.00 – $30.00

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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
Hernes

Publisher: Winter Texts Published Autumn 2021 This story is a literary masterpiece. Long overlooked as a sidenote of Le Guin’s famed career, this deep contemplation of place, being, and naming is set on the Oregon Coast, weaving together the perspectives of four generations of women. It is hard to overstate the value of this work. Both in its technical skill and in its broad, multifaceted view of human experience.

$20.00
Into the Desert, Across the Ice

Publisher: Winter Texts A collection of three short stories by literary hero Ursula K. Le Guin, including “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight,” “She Unnames Them,” and “Sur.” Each of these marvelous stories digs deeply into many of Le Guin’s essential questions, each using a different genre, each investigating the use and power of names and naming.

$20.00

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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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