Joy Young is a performance and teaching spoken word artist based in Phoenix, Az. Their performance works focuses on transgressing borders, both real and imagined, entering social justice topics through poetic personal narratives, has been featured on Button Poetry and Everyday Feminism as well as on stages and in colleges and classrooms across the country. Additionally, they are the cofounder and editor of Prickly Pear Printing, a project dedicated to highlighting written and visual work with a focus on growth, beauty, and the celebration of bodies and narratives often silenced. Whether creating storytelling curriculum for restorative justice or community engagement projects, running workshops that explore identity and what it means to be human, or performing their own poetry and stories, Joy’s work seeks to cultivate strong personal narratives within a larger social justice context, which is why they were awarded the Mayor’s Arts Award in 2018 and named Storyteller of the Year by the Phoenix New times in 2019. They believe our personal narratives should be a driving force for healing ourselves and the world around us— that they are a doorway through which we should consciously enter the world of social justice in hopes of creating understanding, connection, and making substantive change.