About Us

Our Mission

Skull + Wind Press strives to publish diverse voices of national importance while we closely tend to our regional responsibilities. As an organization based in, and in love with, our local community in Albuquerque and our wider communities in New Mexico and the Southwest, we also strive to build and foster an inclusive community that can support these voices. The long history of art, artists, and artist communities in New Mexico—from the earliest Apache, Diné, and Pueblo artists up through the Taos Art Colony and into the present day—will always inform, guide, and inspire how we run our press and position ourselves on the land we occupy and the space we take up in our community.

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Our Community Commitment

Literacy rates in New Mexico are low as anyone familiar with New Mexico knows. What’s amazing about presses is they can act as lightning rods and rallying points for community literacy. They can, as the Loft and Catapult both have, expand into offering community classes. Additionally, poetry’s current massive cultural impact and popularity both show that people want to read. They just need to be given them something worth reading. We want to give them poetry that is important, to them and to the world. We want to give them something they’ve been missing.

We hope, in small but growing ways, to do what we can to amplify voices that have been neglected, to open up the idea of what an inclusive literature looks like, and to make ourselves into something that every city, but especially Albuquerque, needs—a literary hub with resources for our community.

Using small presses like Graywolf Press, Coffee House Press, and Milkweed Editions as models, we hope to establish Skull + Wind as a nexus for community in Albuquerque, a literary entity open to the needs of the community of which we are part. Beyond offering writing classes and supporting literacy efforts, future hopes include establishing a brick-and-mortar indie bookstore in Albuquerque, sustainable reading series, and creating paid positions starting with paid part-time internships and eventually including full-time positions beginning with development and marketing.