Catapult

Cover Photo: Two trays of homemade confections usually offered to Jewish families sitting shiva

After Sitting Shiva in the Pandemic, What Comes Next?

The grief of the pandemic era is ongoing. What happens if everyone is sitting shiva at once?

Sep 22, 2021

People | Brains!

Does Making Predictions Impede the Formation of Memories?

When your brain is presented with a scenario, it makes a decision: Does it file this moment away as a unique event, or slot the information into an existing pattern?

Sep 22, 2021

Cover Photo: Illustration by JC

Columns | Myanmar Voices

“My art is a way to show that we are fighting”

For us in Myanmar, the art reflects our reality.

Jessica Goudeau

Sep 21, 2021

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASSES

Catapult online classes: Tatiana Johnson-Boria, 4-Week Online Poetry Seminar: Excavating the Self, Poetry, Seminar

Online | Poetry | Seminar

4-Week Online Poetry Seminar: Excavating the Self

Tatiana Johnson-Boria

Catapult online classes: Don't Write Alone, Don’t Write Alone: Online Retreat, Open-Genre, Intensive

Online | Open-Genre | Intensive

Don’t Write Alone: Online Retreat

Don't Write Alone

Catapult online classes: Najya Williams , 4-Week Online Open-Genre Workshop for Black Writers: Language as a Place of Struggle, Open-Genre, Workshop

Online | Open-Genre | Workshop

4-Week Online Open-Genre Workshop for Black Writers: Language as a Place of Struggle

Catapult online classes: Emily Adrian, 4-Week Online Fiction Seminar: Writing Dialogue, Fiction, Seminar

Online | Fiction | Seminar

4-Week Online Fiction Seminar: Writing Dialogue

Catapult online classes: Khalisa Rae, 8-Week Online Open-Genre Workshop: Appreciating Queer Poetry & Prose, Open-Genre, Workshop

Online | Open-Genre | Workshop

8-Week Online Open-Genre Workshop: Appreciating Queer Poetry & Prose

Catapult online classes: Alex McElroy, 8-Week Online Fiction Workshop: Mastering Novel Openings, Fiction, Novel, Workshop

Online | Fiction, Novel | Workshop

8-Week Online Fiction Workshop: Mastering Novel Openings

Catapult online classes: Natasha Oladokun, 6-Week Online Poetry Workshop: Revising Your Drafts Like a Gardener & Not Police, Poetry, Workshop

Online | Poetry | Workshop

6-Week Online Poetry Workshop: Revising Your Drafts Like a Gardener & Not Police

Natasha Oladokun

Catapult online classes: Richard Chiem, 6-Week Online Fiction Workshop: How to Break Hearts, Fiction, Workshop

Online | Fiction | Workshop

6-Week Online Fiction Workshop: How to Break Hearts

Don’t Write Alone

Cover Photo: A screencap from the 1989 film 'Say Anything,' in which the actor John Cusack, wearing a trench coat, lifts a boom box over his head.

Don’t Write Alone | Shop Talk

“It’s downright wild out there”: A Q&A on Book Sales with Alyson Forbes

As part of our Money Week series, Alyson Forbes shares the ins and outs of book sales and explains how indie presses “care about your book the way John Cusack cares about Ione Skye in ‘Say Anything’.”

Sep 14, 2021

Cover Photo: This photograph shows a person with silver nail polish looking a tax documents spread out on white floorboards.

Don’t Write Alone | Shop Talk

Financial Advice for the Freelancer

For our Money Week series, Nicole Dieker answers commonly-asked questions from freelance writers

Sep 15, 2021

Cover Photo: This image shows a tiny figurine of a person sitting on top of a pile of gold coins. They are reading a book with their legs crossed.

Don’t Write Alone | Shop Talk

Book Contracts: Let’s Talk Money

As part of our Money Week series, literary agent Kate McKean shares the first installment of her column on book contracts, this one addressing advances, payouts, and royalties.

Sep 16, 2021

Culture

Cover Photo: A black and white photograph of a young girl silhouetted against a window. She is holding a spoon to her mouth and eating from a bowl.

Seeking Culinary Guidance from God, My Mom, and Kelly Ripa

Ariella Garmaise

Cover Photo: Several rows of multi-colored sewing threads arranged on a rack. The colors span the rainbow spectrum.

Tiny Stitches for Big Feelings

Cover Photo: This photograph is of singer/songwriter Joan Baez, performing on stage while singing into a microphone and strumming her guitar. She looks serious and a spotlight accentuates her shining gray hair.

Prison Visitation Isn’t Like the Movies

New from Catapult Books

Catapult | fiction

You Exist Too Much: A Novel by Zaina Arafat

Catapult | fiction | novel

Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler

Catapult | nonfiction

Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses

Catapult | family | novel

Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer by Jamie Figueroa

Catapult | essays | memoir

Pop Song by Larissa Pham

Catapult | novel

Bewilderness by Karen Tucker

Catapult | fiction

Dead Souls by Sam Riviere

Catapult | short stories

Prepare Her: Stories by Genevieve Plunkett

Columns

Cover Photo: A university campus in autumn, the maple trees aflame against the white columns of academia

Columns | Dialek / Dialect

What Kind of Doctor Do I Want to Be?

We can resist the violences we know firsthand, to truly equate teaching and learning with openheartedness, with survival, even with nurture.

Khairani Barokka *

Sep 20, 2021

Cover Photo: photograph from a protest centered on a person in a wheelchair, with short gray hair and a black and white striped top and blue skirt, to whose wheelchair is attached a sign reading "#NoBodyIsDisposable"

Columns | An Unquiet Mind

Give Disability Feminism the Respect It Deserves

We speak of the radicalization of disabled people, but so few have that experience. So many never even know us.

Sep 20, 2021

Cover Photo: A book cover from the Goosebumps series: a tent in the terrifying woods at night; a creature with glowing eyes prowls about the tent's opening

Columns | Scaring Children

Ingredients of a Goosebump

All the things I would have shielded my younger self from, they crop up in books, too. And they are not the monsters with the glowing eyes.

Sep 16, 2021

Books

Cover Photo: An image of The Phantom Tollbooth’s cover

The Transportive Power of ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’

Anya Jaremko-Greenwold

Cover Photo: crop of comic book cover illustration of Riri WIlliams, aka Ironheart

How I Became a Scholar of Black Girl Fantasy

Ravynn K. Stringfield

Cover Photo: a grey-brown bronze statue of Michel de Montaigne, depicted here as an aging man with a bald head, a mustache, and short beard, wearing a neck ruff, robes, and a chain of office

My Father, Montaigne, and the Art of Living

Ann Tashi Slater

Poetry

Cover Photo: illustration of a front porch in the evening, with three different generations represented by a chair, a rocking chair, and toys scattered on the porch, with windchimes in the foreground and a school building visible in the distance

Catapult | Poetry

When your friend tells you: “these kids

at night, when i’m outside and / the wind shakes the chimes, it sounds like the bell

Sep 14, 2021

Cover Photo: a man standing on an abstract beach depicted in shades of black, purple, and fiery red, with ashes swirling around and a red phoenix flying overhead

Catapult | Poetry

Ashes at Kande Beach, Malawi

Everything is an elegy these days, all chipped rings, / clipped wings.

Jun 29, 2021

Cover Photo: abstract nude of a reclining woman with dark brown braids whose skin is a variety of brown and caramel shades, dark and light shadows meant to evoke crystalline-sugar highlights

Catapult | Poetry

Sugar

I took my time shrugging / into this divinity

Camonghne L Felix

Jun 02, 2021

Fiction

Cover Photo: This illustration shows three people sitting together in close intimacy, their arms around each other, faces turned toward each other as if talking and listening. The illustration is done with bright streaks of color blocking.

Fiction | Short Story

Poly Throuple Technology

What we liked most of all was each other. All three of us, the glorious fabric of the relationship, the family we made of ourselves—but we were losing the exhilaration we’d once felt, the wild emotional loops of our shared-identity roller coaster.

Sep 17, 2021

Cover Photo: A photograph of an audience listening as if to a speaker. The faces of the audience members are mostly cropped out of frame; the photo focuses on the notebooks in their laps.

Fiction | Short Story

Not Kinky

The audience Q and A begins, and someone asks about the relationship between kink and queerness.

Sep 10, 2021

Cover Photo: An illustration of two hands, made of metal reaching for one another

Fiction | Short Story

Become of Me

Do not fear your moments of sorrow, your deep frustration, the force of your being. I have made you strong enough to want and not receive.

Sep 03, 2021