![]() While the Catapult team doesn’t have plans to host courses outside of New York City, it will offer online courses starting in 2016. The program offers six-week workshops (limited to six students each), as well as daylong publishing and writing boot camps, taught by both established and emerging writers such as Mary Gaitskill and Julia Pierpont. In addition to its publishing platforms, Catapult offers a robust series of writing classes in New York City. With this type of community engagement, Hunter hopes the site will eventually attract a million unique visitors a month (by comparison, Electric Literature attracts three million unique visitors a year)-an audience that will help build and sustain a readership for Catapult’s books. ![]() Readers can promote pieces they like, and the web editors will choose their favorite pieces, which will then be published on the curated site those writers selected will be compensated for their work. The Catapult website also hosts a Community section, which allows writers to self-publish stories and comment on one another’s work. “Hopefully that includes graphic pieces and stories told in multimedia.” Catapult also publishes pieces with original art by its in-house illustrator, Tallulah Pomeroy recent works have included Nao-cola Yamazaki’s story in translation about amoebas, “False Geneology,” and Joy Williams’s story about a daughter visiting a nursing home, “Cats and Dogs.” Submissions for the website are open year-round, and contributors are paid for their work. “We’re thinking about stories very widely,” says Igarashi, the former managing editor of Granta. Web editor in chief Yuka Igarashi and associate web editor Mensah Demary say they are more concerned with a compelling story than genre distinctions. The company’s website ( ), meanwhile, publishes original short fiction and nonfiction that complements the press’s editorial focus. Strachan says Catapult is seeking “American and international fiction and narrative nonfiction that is alive, insightful, illuminating, stirring, and surprising by way of unique voices-whether emerging or established-who honor the craft of writing.” The press will open its doors to unagented submissions every April and October, and released its first titles this fall: Padgett Powell’s short story collection Cries for Help, Various, in September and Gavin McCrea’s debut novel, Mrs. Meanwhile, Newman has been named the company’s editor-at-large.Ĭatapult’s editorial focus will be broader than that of Black Balloon (which will continue to publish more experimental books as an imprint of Catapult), with twelve titles published in both print and e-book format each year. Strachan has worked as an editor at the New Yorker Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Little, Brown, and is known for acquiring Marilynne Robinson’s debut novel, Housekeeping, as well as books by Tom Wolfe, Lydia Davis, and Seamus Heaney. Koch enlisted Hunter, who then recruited industry veteran Pat Strachan to take the role of editor in chief. “Both Catapult and Black Balloon sprang from a deep-seated belief that a well-told story can be an accidental training ground for empathy, for expanding our minds and developing personally.” “Since the inception of Black Balloon, part of the vision was always to create a mechanism for writers to find one another, support one another, and share their work,” says Koch. Koch-Catapult CEO and daughter of billionaire conservative industrialist Charles Koch-provided the seed funding for the company, which is operating on a budget in the high six figures. ![]() The new operation, headquartered in New York City with a satellite office in Portland, Oregon, evolved out of the independent press Black Balloon Publishing, which was established in 2010 by Elizabeth Koch and Leigh Newman. “Catapult conceptually mirrors the ecosystem in which writers and creatives exist right now,” says Andy Hunter, Catapult’s publisher and the cofounder of the popular website and digital publisher Electric Literature.
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