Introducing Catalyst Press 1 · run Supertech, Africa’s leading independent Engineering firm....

Introducing Catalyst Press 1

THRILLER/MYSTERY

Sacrificed 3

Dark Traces 4

Crackerjack 5

The Wall 6

Dark Video 7

Bitter Pill 8

Outside the Lines 9

LITERARY FICTION

We Kiss Them With Rain 10

The Lion’s Binding Oath 11

Love Interrupted 12

Bom Boy 13

Unmaking Grace 14

YOUNG READERS

Shaka Rising⭐ 15

King Shaka⭐ 16

The Fiery Spiral Trilogy 17

Small Mercies 18

NON-FICTION/MEMOIR

A Road Called Down on Both Sides: Growing up in Ethiopia and America 19

Cape Town: A Place Between 20

Cat Among the Pigeons❦ 21

Words and Things: A Single Girl’s Life in Cape Town in Comics and Words 22

Story Press Africa 23

Powers Squared 24

A Message from Jessica Powers, Catalyst founder and editor 25

⭐ Published under the Story Press Africa imprint

❦ Published under the Powers Squared imprint

INTRODUCING CATALYST PRESS

Catalyst Press is an independent publishing company founded in 2017. At Catalyst, we see books as a spark for change in the world—sometimes as wild, fiery revolutions; and sometimes in quieter ways.

We seek to publish books that reveal the world from different perspectives, tilting or reversing or tweaking our own understanding of what’s real, true, necessary, or beautiful.

Catalyst’s publishing program will emphasize books emerging from the African continent and about Africa but not exclusively; we plan to expand to publishing indigenous writers from other parts of the world, all with the goal of publishing literature that exposes the truth and pursues justice and peace.

OUR IMPRINTS:

African stories. African Knowledge. Worldwide

Story Press Africa, an imprint of Catalyst Press (USA) and Jive Media Africa (South Africa), is a celebration of African knowledge.

Humankind emerged in Africa, and with humans came stories as a means for sharing knowledge between people, through the generations. The

rich and vibrant storytelling tradition of Africa is reflected in the visually exciting and compelling narratives of Story Press Africa’s books, linking us

all to our earliest roots and to one another.

Astonishing Scientific Stories from Across the Globe

Helmed by Matthew Powers, co-author of the YA novel Broken Circle

(Akashic Books) along with his sister and Catalyst founder Jessica Powers, Powers Squared will feature books that explore our world

with a scientific eye.

Books featuring the natural sciences, physics, astronomy, and even science-fiction and speculative fiction will find their home at Powers

Squared.

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THRILLER/MYSTERY

SACRIFICED "[A] page-turner that will keep you reading long past the moment the midnight oil burns out…Sacrificed places Chanette Paul among the classiest thriller writers of our day.” — New York Journal of Books

The U.S. debut of bestselling South African writer Chanette Paul, translated from Afrikaans. Rejected by her

parents, sister, husband, and everyone except her extraordinary and unusual daughter, Caz Colijn lives a

secluded life in her own little patch of Africa. But a single phone call from her estranged sister shatters her refuge.

Caz learns that her elderly mother is on her deathbed in Belgium—and that the old woman isn’t really Caz’s

biological mother. This phone call is just the first step down an ever-widening tunnel into Caz’s painful past.

Jetting between Belgium and Africa, she’s desperate to learn who her biological parents are, why they gave her

away, and whether this has anything to do with her daughter’s exceptional nature: she is black, born to two

white parents during the period of apartheid. Caz is so caught up in discovering the truth about the past, she

almost doesn’t notice the man who is falling in love with her. Or the meaning behind the key she receives. Or the

two Congolese who are following her every move in search for something they’re willing to kill for. From the Congo’s sparkling diamond mines to

Belgium’s finest art galleries, from Africa’s civil unrest to its deeply spiritual roots, Sacrificed seamlessly crosses borders and decades with a fiercely captivating story.

About Chanette Paul

Chanette Paul has published 41 best-selling romance, thriller and crime novels in her native

Afrikaans in South Africa. This is her first book translated into English. In South Africa, Chanette has been nominated six times for the prestigious ATKV-Woordveertjies award and has won the

South African Lekkerlit award 3 times.

catalystpress.org | 925-315-5970 | [email protected]

Publication date Oct 2017 496 pages ISBN 978-1-946395-00-9 $16.95 All rights available except Dutch & Afrikaans

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DARK TRACES "A tense and grisly debut novel of suspense from South Africa."—Kirkus, starred review

The body of a teenage girl is found in the veld near an upper middle-class suburb of Cape Town, South Africa. And she’s not the first. When the pathologist discovers she was hanged, she remembers a similar case. The last thing recently widowed Detective Jan Magson feels like taking on is a serial killer file, but alongside Inspector Colin Menck he follows the trail: the teacher with a past; “love letters” mailed to the girl’s parents by, in all likelihood, the murderer; a pool cleaner who likes to take pictures of teenage girls.

Magson has to look the mothers and fathers in the eye. He has to answer their questions. And he can’t. He has no answers. He can’t even answer his estranged son’s questions about how, exactly, his wife died. Another girl is found in a field, leading to a new number of potential suspects. Magson, by now in therapy and trying hard to make a new life for himself, descends on them in earnest. Then two more girls disappear within two days. Magson and Menck are racing against the clock—a weekend, according to the pattern—to try to find them.

About Martin Steyn

Martin Steyn began writing Stephen King-inspired horror stories in his teens. After obtaining degrees in Psychology and Criminology, he studied serial killers and profiling, writing seven true crime profiles for the Crime Library website. Dark Traces is his first novel in English. You can find out more about him at his website, martinsteyn.com.

Publication date Oct 2017 352 pages ISBN 978-1-946395-01-6 $15.95 All rights available except Dutch, Afrikaans, & Turkish


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CRACKERJACK “Impressively original and deftly crafted” —Midwest Book Review

Young, bright and sexy, Carla Vitale has been handpicked to run Supertech, Africa’s leading independent Engineering firm. Then one Friday afternoon in Cape Town, her dream is shattered. Her boss and mentor, Nial Townley, disappears, his luxury vehicle is found in a crevice at the bottom of Chapman’s Peak, and 20 million dollars is missing from the Supertech’s overseas accounts. Three months later and the police are no closer to solving the riddle.

No job, no car, no phone, Carla turns to the one person she believes can help: software hacker turned day-trader, Daniel Le Fleur. But Le Fleur’s maintaining a low profile in Bantry Bay and he’s in no mood to ruin the serendipity.

Other books in the series: Dark Video, pub date Jan 2020 Bitter Pill, pub date Jun 2020

About Peter Church

Peter Church is a South African fiction novelist renowned for the dark and racy nature of his writing. His debut novel, Dark Video, was published by Random House in South Africa and Australia in 2008, and delved into a sordid world of online video sharing. This was followed up in 2011 with Bitter Pill, a thriller dealing with the scourge of drink spiking on the local club scene. Bitter Pill was long listed for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize in the same year. Church lives in Cape Town with his wife, the artist Paula Church, and three children. He is a member of SA’s PEN association of writers and his short stories have been published in a number of local anthologies. His latest novel, Crackerjack will be his North American debut.

Publication date Jan 2019 324 pages ISBN 978-1-946395-11-5 $15.95 All rights available


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THE WALL "Max Annas deftly weaves together suspense, humour, and social commentary in a fast-paced story about class conflict and survival. The Wall is a taut, captivating thriller. Highly recommended." —Sam Wiebe, award-winning author of Invisible Dead and Cut You Down

The Pines, a gated community in the South African city of East London, protects homeowners from crime. But nobody's going to protect the young man trapped behind its walls.

Moses wants one thing: to get home, where his girlfriend and a cold beer are waiting for him. But his car breaks down on an empty street, not a single human being in sight. Moses slips into The Pines, a gated community, in hopes to find help from a university classmate who lives there. Over there, in the “white” world, everything seems calm, orderly, safe. But once inside, he feels like more of an outsider than ever. And he makes a terrible mistake.

Mistaken identities, racial profiling, and class politics form the backdrop of this intense thriller. Winner of the 2017 German Crime Fiction Prize, The Wall (translated by Rachel Hildebrandt) tackles the issues of gun violence, racism, and exclusion in contemporary South Africa—problems that are equally relevant to the United States.

About Max Annas

Before writing novels, Max Annas worked as a journalist. A renowned film critic, his first novel, The Farm, is currently under film production in South Africa.


Publication date May 2019 182 pages ISBN 978-1-946395-14-6 $16.00

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DARK VIDEO Four college boys, a camcorder, and a high-tech video editing system in Cape Town, South Africa. The illicit videos they shoot equal good money—but lead down a sinister path.

A minibus taxi flipping spectacularly on its head; two teenagers engaged in forbidden sex in a shopping-mall rest room; a raunchy table dance in a Cape Town strip club. How are these scenes connected to a beautiful young woman running through a forest near the university early on a Sunday morning?

Alistair Morgan is the key. A gifted law student with a glittering career in the offing, Alistair seems to have it all: looks, charm and money. But his privileged lifestyle is about to be turned upside down as he is lured deeper and deeper into the sinister online world of Dark Video, where reality blurs and morals unravel.

Toggling between the urban landscape of Africa’s southern tip and Seattle, Washington in the mid- to late-2000s, just as YouTube and other video sharing sites were getting started, Dark Video explores the most disturbing and darkest corners of the digital world, where some people will pay for unimaginable videos and others make money in the most depraved way possible.

Other books in the series: Crackerjack, pub date Feb 2019 Bitter Pill, pub date Jun 2020

About Peter Church

Peter Church is the author of Crackerjack, the first of three linked crime novels exploring the dark web. After two decades in the IT industry, he took a break to write and kept going. He lives in Cape Town with his family.


Projected pub date: Jan 2020ISBN 978-1-946395-21-4All rights available, excluding Australia

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BITTER PILL Inside the heaving party hub that is Cape Town’s student playground, someone is preying on the young and unwary. As allegations of drink spiking and illicit sex hit the local papers, university authorities move quickly to limit the damage…

A world away in Seattle, Carlos De Palma, the shadowy operator behind Dark Video, is plotting his survival strategy in the ever-changing Internet landscape. With his precious clients clamoring for heightened thrills, Carlos begins tapping into a new service that blurs the boundaries between the real and virtual worlds…

Enter Robbie Cullen, nice guy and average student, dumped by his girlfriend and struggling with grades. But when it comes to the crunch, Robbie doesn’t know the meaning of stepping back. Once he encounters the beautiful and mysterious Fallon, his small-town bravado is set to make him some powerful enemies. Bitter Pill is a gripping thriller that sweeps through the intoxicating haunts of Cape Town’s nightlife and lingers on the sugary sand of Plettenberg Bay—before exploding on the streets of the Mother City’s exclusive southern suburbs.

Other books in the series: Crackerjack, pub date Feb 2019 Dark Video pub date Jan 2020

About Peter Church

Peter Church is the author of Crackerjack, the first of three linked crime novels exploring the dark web. After two decades in the IT industry, he took a break to write and kept going. He lives in Cape Town with his family.


Projected pub date: Jun 2020 ISBN: 978-1-946395-20-7 All rights available

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OUTSIDE THE LINES Outside the Lines is both a thriller and a family drama. It tells the story of two women: Cathleen, a troubled young woman living in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg; and Flora, who is the domestic worker at Cathleen’s house. Cathleen disappears and tensions and drama ensue.

About Ameera Patel

Ameera Patel is an actor who has worked on stage and in television (best known for her role as Dr Chetty in Generations). She is also an award winning playwright. She received a distinction for her MA in Creative Writing in 2013 (University of the Witwatersrand).


Projected pub date: Dec 2020 English language rights available, excluding southern Africa

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LITERARY FICTION

WE KISS THEM WITH RAIN "Ntshingila's lyrically wrought North American debut is a slim yet satisfying novel sure to trigger a wide range of emotions."—Kirkus, starred review

Life wasn’t always hard for fourteen-year-old Mvelo. There were good times living with her mother and her mother’s lawyer boyfriend. Now her mother is dying of AIDS and what happened to Mvelo remains unspoken, despite its growing presence. But a series of choices,

chance meetings, and Shakespearean comedy-style exposures of hidden identities hands Mvelo a golden opportunity to overcome hardship.

We Kiss Them With Rain explores both humor and tragedy in this modern-day fairytale set in a squatter camp outside of Durban, South Africa, in which the things that seem to be are only a façade and the things that are revealed create a happier, thoroughly believable, alternative.

About Futhi Ntshingila

Futhi Ntshingila grew up in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Now she lives and works in Pretoria. She is a former journalist and holds Masters Degrees in Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution. She loves telling stories about the marginalized corners of society, which includes women and children in South Africa and particularly those who live in the squatter camps. In her two novels published in South Africa, she features strong women who empower themselves despite circumstances that seek to disempower them. We Kiss Them With Rain is her debut into the North American market.

Publication date Mar 2018 172 pages ISBN 978-1-946395-04-7 $14.95 English language rights available, excluding Africa


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THE LION’S BINDING OATH “Informative and direct storytelling from a corner of Africa that’s poorly understood in the West.” —Kirkus

Religious and ethnic conflict may be the Horn of Africa’s most enduring recent legacy. But beneath its recent history of war and displacement lie human stories—families, clans, lovers, neighbors, and friends, all bound together through common cultural, religious, and historical ties.

The Lion’s Binding Oath, Ahmed Ismail Yusuf’s collection of short stories, introduces readers to the people of Somalia and their struggles: their humanity, faith, identity, friendship, and family bonds, as whispers of war grow louder around them. Through stories that span the years before and during Somalia’s civil war, Yusuf weaves together Somalia’s political, social, and religious conflicts with portrayals of the country’s love of poetry, music, and soccer. Yusuf’s collection is a powerful examination of love and resilience in a country torn apart by war, written with deep compassion for the lives of its characters.

About Ahmed Ismail Yusuf

After fleeing Somalia, Ahmed Ismail Yusuf lived in several states but has lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota since 1997. He did not speak English when he arrived, he was a high-school dropout, and he was not sure what his actual age was. Today he has two college degrees and is the author of Somalis in Minnesota, published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press, and Gorgorkii Yimi, a collection of stories in Somali, published by Ponte Invisible. In February 2018, The History Theatre of St. Paul, Minnesota produced his play, “A Crack in the Sky,” a memoir about how Yusuf found inspiration in Maya Angelou and Malcolm X during his early days as an immigrant to the U.S.


Publication date Jun 2018 220 pages ISBN 978-1- 946395-07- 8 $15.95 All rights available

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LOVE INTERRUPTED "Many readers will see themselves in—and find themselves rooting for—the women in Malatji’s solid debut.”— Kirkus

In her debut collection of short fiction, Reneilwe Malatji invites us into the intimate lives of South African women, their whispered conversations, their love lives, their triumphs and heartbreaks. This diverse chorus of female voices recounts misadventures with love, family, and community in powerful stories woven together with anger, politics, and wit.

We overhear the hushed stories of women who endure their husbands’ nyatsis (mistresses), their abuse, or both. We reflect on the legacy of South Africa’s past for today’s relationships. We laugh at the ribald tale of a spinster woman encountering a male stripper for the first time, or the story of a woman befriending the gigolo next door. Reneilwe crafts an engaging collection full of rich, memorable characters who navigate work, love, patriarchy, and racism with thoughtfulness, strength, and humor.

About Reneilwe Malatji

Reneilwe Malatji was born in South Africa in 1968. She grew up in Turfloop township, in the northern part of South Africa, during the era of apartheid. Her father was an academic and her mother was a school teacher. Malatji trained as a teacher and worked as a subject specialist and advisor to provincial education departments. She recently completed a post-graduate diploma in Journalism and an MA in Creative Writing at Rhodes University. She works as a lecturer at the University of Limpopo in South Africa and has an adult son. Love Interrupted is her first book.


Publication date Aug 2018 172 pages ISBN 978-1-946395-03-0 $14.95 English language rights available, excluding Africa

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BOM BOY "Bom Boy is an intricately structured literary novel that powerfully evokes family as a source of loss and struggle, but also of hope." ― Foreword Reviews

First published in South Africa, and substantially revised for North American release, Bom Boy is award-winning author Yewande Omotoso's debut novel.

Abandoned by his birth mother, losing his adoptive mother to cancer, and failing to connect with his distant adoptive father, Leke—a troubled young man living in Cape Town—has developed some odd and possibly destructive habits: he stalks strangers, steals small objects, and visits doctors and healers in search of friendship. Through a series of letters written to him from prison by his Nigerian father, a man he has never met, Leke learns about the family curse—a curse which his father had unsuccessfully tried to remove. Leke’s search to break the curse leads him to strange places.

About Yewande Omotoso

Yewande Omotoso is an architect with a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. Her debut novel Bom Boy was published in South Africa by Modjaji Books in 2011 and was shortlisted for the 2012 Sunday Times Fiction Prize. The Woman Next Door (Chatto and Windus, 2016), Omotoso’s second novel, was published to critical acclaim. She lives in Johannesburg.

Publication date Jan 2019 182 pages ISBN 978-1-946395-10-8 $15.00 All rights available, excluding Africa


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UNMAKING GRACE Winner, Debut Award for South African Writing in English from the University of Johannesburg

Grace’s perfect life in Cape Town is undone when her childhood sweetheart unexpectedly reappears after disappearing during an anti-apartheid police riot a decade earlier.

Family secrets run deep for Grace, a young “colored” woman who grew up in the violent Cape Flats of South Africa during the 1980s. Now she has a career, a kind marriage to a loving man, and a beautiful baby.

After years of believing that her first love Johnny was dead, possibly murdered during the brutal clashes between students and South African security forces, he suddenly returns, finds her, reconnects with an immediate romantic warmth. With Johnny, Grace’s memories of her childhood and the early imprint of domestic violence come rushing back, and she is confronted, once again, with the tragic loss that has shaped her. Unmaking Grace is an intimate portrayal of the legacy of intergenerational violence, both personal and political.

About Barbara Boswell

Barbara Boswell is a feminist literary scholar with an interest in Black diasporic women’s writing, Black South African women’s literature, and queer theory. She earned a PhD in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2010, after joining the Department of Women’s Studies as a Fulbright Scholar. Her MPhil was completed at the Women’s and Gender Studies Programme at the University of the Western Cape.


Projected pub date: Feb 2020 ISBN: 978-1-946395-23-8 World English language rights available, excluding Africa

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YOUNG READERS

SHAKA RISING: A LEGEND OF THE WARRIOR PRINCE

“A worthy introduction that offers a young Anglophone audience entry into a legend of Africa”— Kirkus

Late 18th century. It is a time of bloody conflict and great turmoil. The slave trade expands from the east African coast. Europeans spread inland from the south. And one young boy is destined to change the future of southern Africa.

Shaka, son of the chief, is cast out from the clan when his mother’s powerful rival seeks his half-brother’s ascension to power. Though he takes refuge with his mother’s people, Shaka finds his destiny elsewhere, pledging allegiance to an outsider chief. But when his father dies, Shaka returns to wrest power from his half-brother.

While Shaka has often been portrayed as a cruel and bloodthirsty tyrant, this re-telling of the legend explores the rise to power of a shrewd young prince who must now consolidate a new kingdom through warfare, mediation, and political alliances to defend his people against the expanding slave trade.

About Luke W. Molver

Luke W. Molver studied Fine Art and Graphic Design at the Durban University of Technology and works as a freelance illustrator and comic book creator in Cape Town, South Africa.

Publication date Jan 9 2018 96 pages ISBN 978-1-946498-99-1 | hardcover | $24.00 ISBN 978-1-946498-98-4 | paperback | $16.99 All rights available


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KING SHAKA: ZULU LEGEND It is a time of triumph—and looming danger. The defeat of the slaver clans in Shaka Rising augurs well for the Zulu kingdom, but the ominous tide of colonization is rising as foreign fortune hunters arrive like swallows from across the sea. And in King Shaka’s own lands, insidious treachery threatens the balance of power. King Shaka continues the re-telling of the legend of an African hero who faces new challenges in a changing world as he strives to shield his people from dangers

both within and without.

Other books in the series: Shaka Rising: A Legend of the Warrior Prince

About Luke W. Molver

Luke W. Molver studied Fine Art and Graphic Design at the Durban University of Technology and works as a freelance illustrator and comic book creator in Cape Town, South Africa.

Publication date Oct 1 2019 ISBN: 978-1-946498-90-8 All rights available


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THE FIERY SPIRAL TRILOGY Set in Cape Town, South Africa in 2055. Young and naive, Ebba is given enormous wealth and social power in a world best understood through mythology and the occult. Combining elements of the past and projecting into an unknown future, Helen Brain's ecofeminist trilogy is a powerful commentary on how class, race, and social identity are foundational to the ways in which society is organized and power wielded.

Book 1: The Thousand Steps projected pub date November 2019 On the brink of execution, 16 year old Ebba den Eeden is unexpectedly elevated from the bunker deep in Africa's Table Mountain where she has lived all her life, believing that the world "Above" is uninhabitable. Instead, she is heiress to a massive fortune and a direct descendant of the goddess, who has bequeathed her a mission to save the earth. Navigating the rules and regulations of a society and religion she doesn't understand, she must try and save her friends, still stuck in the bunker and facing execution any day. Other books in the series: The Rising Tide, projected pub date May 2020 The Fiery Spiral, projected pub date November 2020

About Helen Brain

Helen Brain was born in Australia in 1960 and raised in Durban, South Africa. After school, she studied music at the University of Cape Town. Before settling to a life writing and teaching writing online, she was a freelance journalist and editor, a screenprinter and crafter, and taught English, music, and Ancient Greek. A mother to three sons and grandmother to one grandson, Brain lives in Muizenberg, South Africa with her husband.


Projected pub date Nov 2019 ISBN: 978-1-946395-24-5 All rights excluding Southern Africa available

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SMALL MERCIES "You will root for Mercy from the very first page, and she will be in your heart long after you've read this vivid, beautifully written novel." Sara Cassidy, author of A Boy Named Queen and Nevers

Mercy lives in modern-day Pietermaritzburg, South Africa with her eccentric foster aunts—two elderly sisters so poor, they can only afford one lightbulb. A nasty housing developer is eying

their house. And that same house suddenly starts falling apart—just as Aunt Flora starts falling apart. She’s forgetting words, names, and even how to behave in public. Mercy tries to keep her head down at school so nobody notices her. But when a classmate frames her for stealing the school’s raffle money, Mercy's teachers decide to take a closer look at her home life.

Along comes Mr. Singh, who rents the back cottage of the house on Hodson Road. When he takes Mercy to visit a statue in the middle of the city, she learns that the shy, nervous “Mohandas” he tells stories about is actually Gandhi, who spent a cold and lonely night in the waiting room of the Pietermaritzburg train station over a hundred years ago. It marked the beginning of his life’s quest for truth…and the visit to his statue marks Mercy’s realization that she needs—just like Gandhi—to stand up for herself.

Mercy needs a miracle. But to summon that miracle, she has to find her voice and tell the truth—and that truth is neither pure nor simple.

About Bridget Krone

Bridget Krone lives and works in a village called Hilton just outside Pietermaritzburg, in the foothills of the Drakensberg mountains in South Africa. Her office looks onto a field where cows graze in the winter and cranes (both crowned and blue) visit in the summer. She has spent most of her working life writing short novels and English language text books for school children in South Africa. Her favorite stories are those that, just when you expect a lesson, sing a song instead.

Publication date Mar 2020 162 pages ISBN 978-1-946395-16-0 $14.99 All rights available excluding UK/Commonwealth


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NON-FICTION/MEMOIR

A ROAD CALLED DOWN ON BOTH SIDES:GROWING UP IN ETHIOPIA AND AMERICA Caroline Kurtz grew up in the remote mountains of Maji, Ethiopia in the 1950s. Inside her mud adobe home with her missionary parents and three sisters, she enjoyed American family life. Outside, her world was shaped by drums and the joy cry; Jeep and mule treks into the countryside; ostriches on the air strip; and the crackle of several Ethiopian languages she barely understood but longed to learn.

Caroline felt she’d been exiled to a foreign country when she went to Illinois for college. She returned to Ethiopia to teach, only to discover how complex working in another culture and language really is. Life under a Communist dictatorship meant constant outages—water, electricity, sugar, even toilet paper. But she was willing to do anything, no matter how hard, to live in Ethiopia again. Yet the chaos only increased—guerillas marched down from the north, their t-shirts crisscrossed by Kalashnikov bandoliers. When peace returned, Caroline got the chance she’d longed for, to revisit that beloved childhood home in Maji. But maybe it would have been better just to treasure the memories.

About Caroline Kurtz

Caroline Kurtz speaks Amharic fluently and spearheads development in Ethiopia’s Maji District, introducing apples, solar energy, and women’s cottage industries.

She and her sister, the American children’s author Jane Kurtz, recently launched Ready Set Go Books for early Ethiopian readers. Over 12,000 copies have been distributed in Ethiopia. Now retired and living in Oregon, Caroline returns regularly to Ethiopia.

Publication date Jul 15 2019 240 pages ISBN 978-1-946395-15-3 $16.00 All rights available


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CAPE TOWN: A PLACE BETWEEN Our new Intimate Geography Series explores what it means to dwell in a place, to follow its roads, to see behind its walls, to trace its landscapes, and to grasp its histories over time. In each volume, a writer will illuminate a specific place in an intimate way through their lived experiences there and through their deep knowledge of its past and present.

Cape Town is a place between two oceans, between first and third worlds, between east and

west. The majority of its citizens: a people between black and white, native and settler, African

and European. How can we understand a city that is most assuredly in Africa, though not—

seemingly—of it? By exploring these liminal spaces of tween-ness,

we can begin to understand the soul of this town—haunted by its

past, unsure of its future. Always emerging, never arriving. A sun-

drenched peninsula best viewed through a prism noir.

Cape Town: A Place Between is the first of the Intimate

Geographies series. A quirky mix of literary essay meets travel

guide meets personal memoir, each title in the Intimate

Geographies Series provides a personal, idiosyncratic, in-depth

portrayal of a place, filtered through the experiences of an

individual who has lived there, knows it, understands it, has a

powerful relationship with it. Future volumes will feature other

intense portrayals of lesser-known and/or compelling spots all

around the globe.

About Henry Trotter

Henry Trotter is the author of Sugar Girls & Seamen: A Journey into the World of Dockside Prostitution in South Africa. Hailing from California, he has lived in Africa for 20 years and written extensively on African history, culture and education. He will serve as series editor for the Intimate Geography Series. He is based in Cape Town with his wife and daughter.


Projected pub date: Nov 2019 ISBN: 978-1-946395-25-2 All rights available

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CAT AMONG THE PIGEONS Fall in love with the hilarious habits of African creatures you thought you knew and those you’ve never heard of.

In an irreverent but loving treatise on the creatures of South Africa and beyond, David Muirhead features eccentric animal behaviors in his native home. Mixing folklore and legend with a heavy dose of science, Muirhead leaves no wart unexamined in these tales of unrespectable animals.

A book for those delighted to discover what “pronking” means, or that for pythons, swallowing a porcupine whole is the easy part; its afterwards when the anxiety really starts.

Cat Among the Pigeons allows us to laugh our way to a reconnection with the creatures we co-evolved with, highlighting their importance to our collective past and precarious futures. A reminder in our increasingly urban world that the strange and fantastical still roam, crawl, wiggle, swim and soar through the terrestrial and aquatic world, ready to delight and surprise us.

About David Muirhead

Long-time English writer and journalist David Muirhead has already published several books, including a collection of satirical short stories that drew acclaim from the British press. Random House's Struik Nature imprint published his two anthologies of riotous, irrespectable essays on animals, which have been combined into one volume for North America. He lives in Vermont, Western Cape.

Projected pub date: Jan 2020 ISBN:978-1-733547-40-6 All rights available


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WORDS AND THINGS: A SINGLE GIRL’S LIFE IN CAPE TOWN IN COMICS AND WORDS

Karen Vermeulen, a cartoonist, doodler, illustrator, and advertising maven, writes about what it’s like to be a 30s-something single girl in Cape Town in a series of illustrated essays. Bold, sassy, funny, and sarcastic, Karen lays to rest any notion that she “needs a man,” even while she longs for companionship and romance. She finds a dog-like, allergen-free cat as her constant companion in this witty and crazy exploration of Cape Town, sisterhood, romance, sex, and friendship.

About Karen Vermeulen

Karen Vermeulen is an illustrator, designer, art director, and writer living in Cape Town, South Africa. She has designed the majority of Catalyst Press's book covers. She works from a corner of her small flat, her desk facing Table Mountain. She loves humor, stories, patterns and color. Her cat (Sir Henry) loves walking over her keyboard and lying on top of her drawings while she tries to work.


Pub date: TBA All rights available

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Story Press Africa: African knowledge. African Stories. Worldwide.

Story Press Africa is a publishing partnership between Jive Media Africa in South Africa and Catalyst Press in the United States to put African stories on a global platform. Humankind emerged in Africa, and with humans came stories as a means for sharing knowledge between people, through the generations. The rich and vibrant storytelling tradition of Africa is reflected in the visually exciting and compelling narratives of Story Press Africa’s books, linking us all to our earliest roots and to one another. Through the medium of stories (including graphic novels and young adult and children’s literature) we aim to place African knowledge in its rightful place among the knowledge of the world. We publish stories by Africans about Africa for a global audience: authentic, challenging, and frequently controversial visions of the continent that birthed humankind.

Jive Media Africa has worked closely with African researchers to produce books profiling African knowledge for over a decade. Jive is working with the vibrant, creative and powerful spirit of Africa, and the knowledge which is emerging from this continent, on a daily basis. The partnership between Jive and Catalyst explores new ways of taking African stories and African knowledge to the world.

Shaka Rising: A Legend of the Warrior Prince, the first release under the Story Press Africa imprint, is a part of our African Graphic Novel Series. The series presents edgy versions of lesser-known African stories and histories in full-color graphic novels. Each book includes information for further exploration by the curious minded.

Jive Media Africa is a company formed in partnership among Professor Albert Modi (Deputy Vice-Chancellor and senior researcher at the University of KwaZulu-Natal), Robert Inglis (an award winning media and communications specialist) and Hilary Kromberg (a production, marketing, and publishing professional, and author of many of Jive Media Africa's books and comics).

www.jivemedia.co.za

storypressafrica.com | 925-315-5970 | [email protected]

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Powers Squared: Astonishing Scientific Stories from Across the Globe

Powers Squared is devoted to marrying science and story, in all of its varied flavors to re-humanize science and the scientist. In the same way that historical fiction has often introduced the public to a time or place in history and the important events of the period, we want to publish stories, both fiction and nonfiction, in a kaleidoscope of color to illuminate the humans inside, outside, and upside down who make up the totality of the scientific endeavor.

Matthew Powers, the imprint’s chief editor and tastemaker, received his PhD from the University of Utah in Oncological Studies through molecular cell biology. He has, unintentionally, fallen asleep through many boring scientific presentations but also been riveted by exciting scientific work and by the people behind this work. He himself has bored a wide range of people into a comatose state over his own studies and learned that a turn of phrase, or just a plain-old weird slide, can make people sit up and take notice. In the end, a good scientific story is the difference between understanding and caring about a work or ignoring and sleeping through the whole presentation. The power of science to explain and illuminate the natural world is extraordinary but the story, the actual, physical progression of words we chose in telling that story is what makes us care about any scientific endeavor.

As an imprint of Catalyst Press, Powers Squared will retain a strong publishing focus related to Catalyst's African-centric mission but will reach beyond to publish global literature more broadly.

powerssquared.com | 925-315-5970 | [email protected]

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When I was growing up on the U.S.- Mexico border—a bi-national, bi-cultural, bi-lingual, often marginalized spot in America—everyday life for me meant reaching outside of my own home culture. That felt difficult at times. As a young adult, however, 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 immersed in and nurtured by another culture. I witnessed 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, as well as—not to romanticize anything—the emotional and physical violence that accompanies the harsh reality of poverty.

Going to Africa to work with street kids in Kenya as a 19 year-old college student and, later, to learn Zulu and do research for my graduate degree in African history immersed me in the beauty of another part of the world and other cultures altogether. As a long-time writer (I write under the name J.L. Powers) and long time professional in the publishing industry, I realized ultimately that I wanted to bring the beauty of African art, culture, history, and landscape into the world through books. It is my privilege and my passion to do this work.

Thank you!

Jessica Powers, Catalyst Founder & Publisher


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Introducing Catalyst Press 1 · run Supertech, Africa’s leading independent Engineering firm....

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Transcript of Introducing Catalyst Press 1 · run Supertech, Africa’s leading independent Engineering firm....