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.
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!)
#ReadingAfrica Week 2022 is officially here! Kicking off this Sunday, December 4, our sixth annual celebration of all things African literature is shaping up to be our biggest and best yet. We’ve worked so hard to bring together an amazing line-up for you all, including three virtual events, several written roundtables, guest blogs, daily social media challenges, and more!
This year’s live virtual events are:
Sunday December 4th at 2pm EST — Who is African: Place, identity, and belonging in literature, co-hosted with LitNet
Tuesday December 6th at 2pm EST– Behind the Scenes: African filmmakers & writers on interplay and adaptation, co-hosted with the James Currey Society
Saturday December 10th at 2pm EST– The young reader: African children’s literature, co-hosted with World Kid Lit
The reviews have also been rolling in for our upcoming middle grade novel Pearl of the Sea. Publishers Weekly calls it “a winning story of friendship, nature, and trust,” Foreword Reviews says it’s a “vibrant coastal coming-of-age story with secrets, monsters, and thrills throughout” and Kirkus dubbed it “a heartfelt tale.” Check it some sample pages and pre-order here. Pearl of the Sea is available January 31 in North America and March 1 in South Africa.
And ICYMI, read this great feature from Open Country Mag about Pearl of the Sea and our other forthcoming graphic novel, KARIBA, available in June.
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, andyou 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.
Huge congratulations to Futhi Ntshingila and her new novel They Got To You Too, awarded the Sharjah International Book Fair Prize 2022 this week! Futhi is the author of the novel We Kiss Them With Rain, which we published in 2018 and you can check out below in the “From the Backlist” section. We’re so proud of you, Futhi!
We’re gearing up for #ReadingAfrica 2022, this year from Sunday December 4th through Saturday December 10th! All week long, make sure to share your favorite African reads and tell us why you’re #ReadingAfrica by sharing the #ReadingAfrica and #ReadingAfricaWeek hashtags on all of your social media platforms. And as part of the celebration, we’re lining up an amazing virtual events program and we’ll be announcing the events over our socials in the next two weeks, so make sure to give us a follow on our Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter pages. Read more about #ReadingAfrica here, and a very special shoutout to Squid Mag for featuring #ReadingAfrica this week! Continue reading “The Spark: The “Have I Run Out of Cute Titles?” Edition”
“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.
Happy pub week to The Cedarville Shop and the Wheelbarrow Swap! This is the second middle-grade novel from South African author Bridget Krone that we’ve had the privilege to publish (we published Small Mercies in 2020) and we’re so excited to share it with you. Kirkus Reviews called it “a compelling look at friendship and community uplift under harsh circumstances.” Congrats, Bridget!
We’re so thrilled to have been named one of five finalists for the Amber Grant for Women’s September grant! This amazing organization gives $10,000 to a women-owned small business every single month, and we’re very grateful for their recognition and support. [Ed note: We, unfortunately, weren’t awarded the Amber grant, but we are so proud to be part of this amazing group of women entrepreneurs! And we extend our huge congratulations to grantee Brandy Witherow, owner of Lemon Island Seafood, and all of the Amber Grant finalists!]
Two authors from Disruption: New Short Fiction from Africa, Innocent Chizaram Ilo and Caine Prize winner Idza Luhumyo, are featured in this great article from Afrocritik highlighting “15 emerging and gifted voices amplifying African literature”. Disruption, which we co-published last year with the South African non-profit Short Story Day Africa, features stories from Innocent, Idza, and 19 other emerging authors from Africa.
SIFISO MZOBE
And last up, don’t miss the virtual awards ceremony for this year’s Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards, happening Thursday October 27th at 6pm EST. We’re so thrilled that Sifiso Mzobe and his debut novel Young Blood were selected as a finalist for this year’s award. We’re rooting for you, Sifiso!
We’re thrilled with the reception that Bridget Krone’s newest middle-grade novel, The Cedarville Shop and the Wheelbarrow Shophas 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.
We are so excited to announce the launch of our newest series, Panel & Page! The new series is where we’ll be publishing most of our upcoming graphic novels, and we’re so excited to use this announcement to officially tell you about all of the amazing graphic novels you can expect in 2023. You can find out more about Pearl of the Sea and KARIBA—our two upcoming releases from South Africa—and how they’re connected to the award-winning animation studio Triggerfish in this awesome mention here. And speaking of graphic novels, many thanks to World Kit Lit’s Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp for highlighting Shaka Rising—our very first graphic novel release— as one of her top 12 global children’s books for history lovers this week on Words Without Borders!
Lots of events on the way! Caroline Kurtz, author of the award-winning memoir A Road Called Down on Both Sides and the recently-released Today is Tomorrow, visits Chapters Books in Newberg, OR on October 7th as part of the city’s First Friday Artwalk. Also be sure to mark your calendars for Thursday October 27th at 6pm EST for the virtual 2022 Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards ceremony, where Young Blood author Sifiso Mzobe is being honored alongside the other shortlisted authors! And last up, we’re so excited that four Catalyst authors will be taking part in this amazing South African book tour hosted by Atlas Book Club founder Bunmi Emenanjo, where she’ll be bringing overseas visitors to South Africa to explore the country’s incredible beauty and wonderfully diverse literary scene.
