Author: Catalyst Press | Page 2

Catalyst South Africa: Q&A with SarahBelle Selig & Izak de Vries

While our authors make us special, without SarahBelle Selig and Izak de Vries as part of our team, Catalyst Press would be missing a huge part of its heart and soul. While our U.S. team members keep things humming a world away, these two have made us a truly international company. Whether through their connections with South Africa’s literary community, or with the kind of personal touch that only comes from a face-to-face meeting, they have helped build Catalyst South Africa into, what we hope, is a part of the local reading scene. We couldn’t do any of this without them. Ashawnta Jackson, a U.S.-based Catalyst team member, chatted to the pair about their work.

SarahBelle, can you tell us a bit about your role at Catalyst? What is the South African branch up to?

Specifically in South Africa, I’ve got a bit of a liaison role, which means I’m working face to face with our local authors, our South African distributor, and the many great booksellers and educators we’re connected with here. Izak and I also tag team our local publicity: everything from getting reviews for our authors in South African media, to getting them on panels at festivals.

We’re having so much fun at Catalyst South Africa these days! We’ve ramped up our events, from book launches and comics workshops, to author readings at local school libraries and even a beach cleanup. We hosted a booth at the inaugural Comic Con Cape Town to show off our amazing line up of African graphic novels and to connect with readers. We’re busy prepping the release of our first ever Afrikaans book for kids, and we’re actively building out our relationships with local nonprofits, bookstores, and schools. The Catalyst office is definitely the most active here that it’s ever been, I’d say.

Peter Church on his Dark Web Trilogy

Editor’s Note: We’re revisiting this 2020 Q&A with Peter because now you can buy all three of his thrillers in one convenient bundle! The Dark Web Trilogy bundle is out on May 16, and pre-orders are available now.

Peter Church’s Dark Web Trilogy takes readers to the dark side of our digital lives. Starting with Crackerjack, these interconnected techno-thrillers explore the dangers lurking in a shadowy, underground world where the virtual and the physical collide in dangerous ways. The final installment in the series, Bitter Pill, comes to US readers on June 15. We caught up with Peter to chat about the series, his process for writing these connected stories, and if we might see more from the characters his created.

Continue reading “Peter Church on his Dark Web Trilogy”

Writers of Zimbabwe, a #ReadingAfrica Panel

We’re excited to present a special, pre-recorded panel of Zimbabwean writers. We have the honor of publishing two (soon to be three) books by award-wining author Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, and when she asked us if she could convene a panel of some of her writing community to talk about what they’re working on, what they’re reading, or as Siphiwe puts it in the conversation “We write from the continent, I think we do both the reading and the writing from Africa, and I just really want to capture us as a community, and then share that.”

This conversation features CM Elliott, Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, Susan Hubert, Bryony Rheam, John Eppel, and Violette Kee-Tui. Moderated by Drew Shaw. Transcript to come.

Warming up the Inkubator

We loved working with Short Story Day Africa to release the anthology, Disruption: New Short Fiction from Africa last year. This collection brought together writers from across Africa, each writing about the many ways that we grow, adapt, and survive in the face of our ever-changing global realities. Short Story Day Africa as long been a force in the African writing community. Through their writing and editing workshops and the Short Story Day Africa Prize, they have nurtured dozens of writers and editors, and brought many to international attention. This year, one of the writers featured in Disruption took home the prestigious Caine Prize, and we don’t see this momentum stopping anytime soon.

We were proud to partner with them on Disruption, and are excited to work with them again on their newest anthology. These stories will come from the writers of Inkubator, an intensive, three-month, online seminar designed by Short Story Day Africa and Laxfield Literary Associates. Through this program, writers develop, grow and hone their fiction writing and self-editing skills. The twelve writers chosen for the seminar are mentored by a distinguished group of writers, editors, and publishing professionals, and their final works will be compiled into an anthology.

And here’s where we come in.

Musings on the Recent Rise of African-Inspired Mythology and Folklore in Books, Movies, Art and Popular Culture

If you’ve been following along with us this week, you’ll know that in our panel on December 6, the question of the “Black Panther effect” came up. Simply put, this is the rising tide lifting all boats theory, in which the tide is the raging success of the Marvel films and comics, and the all boats is every other African creator. Needless to say, the effect of Black Panther, in all of its forms, had its pros and cons.

One of the pros is that people from all over are finally listening to the stories African creators have been telling for generations.

In this #ReadingAfrica guest essay, author Buki Papillon explores what it means to tell your stories and to have those stories heard.

Vantablack, a #ReadingAfrica Playlist

Part of why #ReadingAfricaWeek is so important to us is that we believe that art from the continent— it’s diversity, it’s longevity, it’s complexity— is worth sharing. With that in mind, we’re proud to bring you this year’s #ReadingAfrica playlist. Like last year’s, which was curated by musician Amanda Khiri, this playlist contains a multitude of sounds and genres.

This year’s playlist is brought to us by Nico Rosario. Nico is an artist, researcher, and activist, whose work meets at the intersections of creative arts, politics, culture, and education with a focus on youth and subcultures. A writer and photographer, she is the director of the Academy for Theatre Leadership at Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles and the host of Maximum R&B, a monthly radio show on Oroko Radio, based in Accra. When not on a dancefloor or making mixtapes, Nico is working on two long-form writing projects: a novel centered on underground dance culture and the art world and a screenplay about straight-edge culture and militant veganism in ‘90s-era Salt Lake City. She can be found on Instagram and Mixcloud: @DJ_Zira and at her website: www.nicorosario.com (which is currently being spruced up for the new year!)

Enjoy!

Meet the #ReadingAfrica 2022 Panelists!

We’re getting so close to #ReadingAfrica Week! We’ve reached out to bookstores, libraries, publishers, and other literary organizations to spread the word about our annual celebration of African literature. But maybe the best advertisement is introducing you to the amazing group of storytellers and creatives that will be appearing on our live panels this week. All panels begin at 1PM New York| 6PM London| 8PM South Africa, and you can register for them here. We created a booklist on Bookshop.org featuring some of the works from our panelists. For those who’s work isn’t available in the US, be sure to check out African Books Collective.

#ReadingAfrica Week 2022 Events

We’ve got a lot planned for this year’s celebration! Over the next few days, we’ll tell you more about our panelists and moderators. But these are some conversations you won’t want to miss. Register for one or all here.

Join Us for #ReadingAfrica Week 2022

“This place called Africa. You think you know it. You have learned about it in school. You have come across stories about it in the media. Perhaps, you have visited the place or better still live there and so you feel that you really know it. It is not until you pick up a book that you realize that you probably do not know this place called Africa — its many countries and peoples, its multitudes of languages and experiences, its overwhelming diversity and vibrancy — as well as you think you do. And that is the beauty and joy of reading African Literature — the constant discovery.”
—Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, author of The Theory of Flight and The History of Man

We started #ReadingAfrica Week in 2017 as an annual celebration of African literature. Each year, during the first full week of December (this year December 4-10), we ask book-lovers of all kinds to use the hashtags #ReadingAfrica or #ReadingAfricaWeek across social media on posts that spotlight African literature.

We started this campaign to bring attention to writers who are doing diverse and genre-spanning work from every corner of the African continent. And because we’re an indie publisher, we really wanted to spotlight all of the great things our colleagues in the indie publishing world are doing to bring these voices to more readers. Our first year was small: we reached out to just a few presses and asked them to use the hashtag on their social media posts to spotlight new books, old favorites, upcoming releases, and gems from their catalogs to show people the diversity of African literature.

Teaching Guides for The Cedarville Shop & the Wheelbarrow Swap

We’re thrilled with the reception that Bridget Krone’s newest middle-grade novel, The Cedarville Shop and the Wheelbarrow Shop has been getting since it was released in South Africa! Not only is it great to see a local author being supported (nearly 100 people turned out for Bridget’s book launch!), it’s validating to see that people are hungry for stories that reflect their home, their lives, and their experiences. In 1990, educator Rudine Sims Bishop published her groundbreaking essay “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors,” which spoke to the idea of books being a tool for empathy, understanding, and confidence:

Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.

That’s been something we’ve always looked toward in our children’s books, and Cedarville is another great addition. The novel, set in the small, impoverished village of Cedarville, centers on 12-year-old Boipelo Seku. When he reads an article about a Canadian man who, starting with a paperclip, makes trade-after-trade until he gets a house, Boi thinks that this might be a way to do the same for his own family. He hatches his own trading plan starting with a tiny clay cow he molded from river mud. Trade by trade, Boi and his best friend Potso discover that even though Cedarville lacks so many of the things that made the paperclip trade possible, it is fuller than either of them ever imagined.