Happy New Year, everyone! It has been a really busy, really exciting 2017 for us here at Catalyst. We’ve done a lot of learning, growing, and building this year and we can’t wait to keep bringing that energy into 2018.

As the year begins, we find ourselves right in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign to bring the second volume of Shaka Rising to life, and we’d love your help. Check out our project to learn more about our plans, and while you’re there make sure to take a look at some of the fantastic rewards we’re offering to our donors. We’d love to be able to send you one of those. Also at our project page, Catalyst founder Jessica Powers has written a few words about her life and why this book, this project, and this press mean so much to her:

When I was growing up on the U.S.- Mexico border, there were no books that reflected the reality of my life. I read Laura Ingalls Wilder avidly, to the point where I grew my hair past my waist and only wore dresses. I wanted to be a pioneer girl. Anything was better than the desert town I lived in!

Then I discovered Anne of Green Gables, and all the companion books, and I desperately wished I was Canadian, and perhaps an orphan, growing up on the lush, mysterious, wild island of Prince Edward Island. (As an aside, I visited as an adult and was disappointed that it was basically farmland, with potatoes being the main crop.)

As a kid, I looked around at my neighborhood and it looked to me like nothing more than a dusty desert town of broken down trucks. I didn’t see the magic of migrant workers who passed our house, sometimes several times a day, following the power lines from Mexico to the chili fields of New Mexico. I didn’t understand the musicality that the lilting Spanish I heard every day was infusing into my language. I didn’t realize the way Mexican culture had surrounded and gentled the harsher white Anglo culture that gave birth to my parents.

As a young adult, I bumbled my way into understanding the beautiful gift I had been given: that, instead of the invisible privilege many white children of America are born into, I had grown up witnessing daily the cycle of death and rebirth that accompanies the immigrant experience, the grace that is embodied in failure and the willingness not to let that crush you but to get up and try again, and–not to romanticize anything–the emotional and physical violence that accompanies the harsh reality of poverty. The experiences of immigrant families weren’t abstract experiences. I saw it in my friends’ families and the families of boys I had crushes on and with people at church.

Perhaps even more pertinent, I grew up as a minority. I was a white child with parents from Iowa and South Dakota but almost everybody I knew was Mexican or Mexican-American. Everyday life meant reaching outside of my own home culture. It meant, too, that I was enveloped in another culture to such an extent that to this day it feels like home. And it meant that I’ve always been interested in the ways that race, culture, belief systems, and immigration impact nations and their histories.

Read more about Jessica’s (and Catalyst’s!) story over at our Kickstarter page.