In 2018 Jess joined the local arts group Feminist Union of Charlottesville Creatives (FUCC), now known as Bad Milk Press. Bad Milk Press is an arts organization creating programming that compensates artists and writers in central Virginia, while also creating spaces that allow women, non-binary and genderqueer creatives to share their work, develop their skills, build their artist resumés, and gain visibility within the larger local artist scene. Since joining Bad Milk Press, Jess has been featured in several group exhibitions, authored submissions to various issues of the zine, MALA LECHE, and guest-edited issue #5: Embodiment–Secrets Under Our Skin.

Excerpt from Embodiment Letter from the editor:  

“For me, embodiment is the language of The body. My body. Your body. Our big, vast, universe-sized shared body. For a lot of us, it’s become a foreign language. We’ve become so programmed to believe our bodies are “obscene”, it seems we’d sooner become astronauts exploring space before fathoming to learn the languages of our own anatomy or natural niches. Our culture and social expectations have made us strangers to our physical selves and the somatic domains of communication: how bodies talk. Our institutions have us relying on physicians acting as interpreters to tell us what our bodies need instead of preparing us with knowledge of how to study our bodies ourselves, and so we despair from countless inevitable miscommunications and atrophied intuition. Fear, shame, and stigma keep us closeted from sacred knowledge gleaned from secrets whispered beneath our skin.”