It’s reading season! The Catalyst team has assembled some of our favorites for all the book-lovers on your gift list this year!
Got a young bookworm at home? Here are my top picks for teen and tween readers.—SarahBelle Selig, South African office manager/publicity
A young boy brings his community together in a creative way in The Cedarville Shop & the Wheelbarrow Swap. Set in the last days of South Africa’s apartheid-era, Halley’s Comet finds three teens in an unlikely friendship, bound by a shared secret. An ancient prophesy sets 16-year-old Ebba on a quest to save the world in The Thousand Steps, book one of the Fiery Spiral trilogy.
We’ve published a lot of young creators here at Catalyst Press, but none as young as Kendra Powers, my awesome fourteen-year-old niece whose photo book, Bait the Toad, comes out this month. Featuring photos of Kendra’s pet toad Bait, whose sassy photo shoots became an overnight TikTok sensation, Bait the Toadis a side-splitting, quicky gift book that would make a great holiday gift for animal lovers of any age. I sat down with Kendra to chat about Bait, her new book, and her impressive crafting skills.
Bees are a vital part of life on Earth. The UN launched World Bee Day in 2018 to show us just how vital. Without pollinators like bees, “would equal a world without food diversity – no blueberries, coffee, chocolate, cucumbers and so much more.”
We’re celebrating #WorldBeeDay by pointing you toward some of our books that highlight just how important bees are. And we’ll share some organizations that are doing the very important work of keeping our ecosystems buzzing along.
#ReadingAfrica means opening up your reading to include a wide array of voices, thought, and genre. And it can also mean learning more about the plants and animals that make the continent so special. When we connect to the stories of the land, it helps us understand exactly what we’re protecting, and why it’s so vital we do.
After losing South African treasure Elsa Joubert last week, we said goodbye to two more literary legends, including the father of Chicano literature Rudolfo Anaya, and Charles Webb, the man who gave us The Graduate.
Queenie author Candice Carty-Williams became the first Black author to win Book of the Year at the British Book Awards, and Girl, Woman, Other author Bernadine Evaristo also scored an award. Here’s what Carty-Williams had to say about her win.
On that note, The New York Times published a collection of interviews with Black authors, agents, editors and booksellers on what it means to Black in publishing. A collaborative research report on the industry, titled “Rethinking ‘Diversity’ in Publishing,” (PDF) was also released this week, featuring a foreword by Evaristo.
John Bolton’s hotly debated memoir sold over 780,000 copies in its first week, and another Trump book is on the way: a New York court gave Simon & Schuster the green light to publish President Trump’s niece Mary L. Trump’s tell-all book, set to release this month.
A previously unpublished, unfinished story from Little Women author Louisa May Alcott was released this week, and it looks like we may not have to wait much longer for the next Game of Thrones book. More good news: Lucasfilm just announced a huge publishing deal to produce a series of novels, storybooks, comics and more, based on the wildly popular Star Wars spin-off, The Mandalorian.
We have two new additions to our “Conversations with…” YouTube series, a series of conversations with Catalyst authors, friends, and partners. This week, our publisher Jessica Powers is in conversation with A Road Called Down on Both Sides author Caroline Kurtz and Bunmi Emenanjo, founder of Atlas Book Club. And ICYMI: check out my conversation with Small Mercies author Bridget Krone last week.
Finally, Washington Post with the headline we can all agree on. [Ed. Note: And, though she’s too modest to share, for a follow-up to this, check out SarahBelle’s article at World Literature Today on how one bookstore is responding to these new, browser-less times]
Our weekly round-up of literary news here at Catalyst and beyond, is brought to you by our intern Naomi Valenzuela. Naomi is from Phoenix, Arizona and El Paso, Texas, and is majoring in Creative Writing and minoring in English & American Literature at the University of Texas, El Paso, with plans of working in the publishing business after graduation
The Lolo Series
Libraries usually have summer reading programs once the summer vacation season starts. However, these are unusual times. Book Riotexplores what libraries are doing to continue these programs safely.
May 25 was Africa Day! And Brittle Paper has a list of 13 African, under-the-radar books from the 1960s.
Over at Read It Forward, author Laura McHugh writes about why realistic heroines are the ones we empathize the most.
Electric Lit has nine books exploring societal beauty standards and how they become obstacles to women.
Cat Among the Pigeons
Brightly has another list to diversify children’s reading lists. They recommend these 11 books that celebrate Muslim culture.
The National Book Festival will be celebrating its 20th anniversary this year but will be moving to a virtual setting due to the pandemic. Read more about it at The Washington Post.
LitHubhas an article about the podcast “Keen On” where speakers discuss how our reading of some books may change after the pandemic.
Book-lovers are pretty great, aren’t they? But to create the next generation of readers, we have to start early. That’s why we’re so proud of our books for kids, young adults, and our crossover titles. We hope that one of these stories is just the spark to create a reader for life.
During these challenging times, we know that a lot of parents are now finding themselves in the role of teacher, and you may be using one of our books to supplement your curriculum. If that’s the case, first of all, thank you, and please let us know how you’re using our books. We’d love to hear from you!
If you’re interested in incorporating African history and stories into your child’s reading, we’re pleased to offer the following resources/activities. Please check back as we add new resources and roll out a dedicated page where you can access these, and future activities. We realize that education as we’ve known it has changed quite a bit in the last few weeks, and we not only want to be responsive to that, we want to provide as many resources as possible to guide us, not just through this moment, but in the future. Continue reading “Teaching Guides & Activities for Catalyst Books”
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