Jessica Peterson is the printer and designer at The Southern Letterpress. She started printing in 2003 at a workshop at the Center for Book Arts in New York and hasn’t stopped since.

Originally from Rochester, New York, she moved to Alabama in 2006 to earn an MFA from the University of Alabama's Book Arts Program. She established The Southern Letterpress in 2012 in Columbus, Mississippi, with the mission to bring letterpress printing resources and education to her local community.

Since 2015, The Southern Letterpress is based in the Ninth Ward in New Orleans, Louisiana in a building shared by Antenna's Paper Machine.

Since 2016, Jessica has been learning about how motherhood intersections with small business ownership and printing.

See a visual history of The Southern Letterpress.

The Southern Letterpress studio contains a Vandercook SP-15 from 1969, and an ancient Heidelberg windmill from 1953, and a small table top platen press from 1890. The studio holds around 80 typefaces in metal and wood type.