ABOUT US
THE KATES HILL PRESS
Is an independent publisher committed to producing short runs of fiction and social history books with a west midlands theme or by a west midlands writer.
We now also publish booklets of poetry and dialect verse by Black Country/West Midlands poets.
THE KATES HILL PRESS
Operates in the Small Press tradition in which short runs are produced on subjects the publisher believes in which conventional publishing houses cannot afford to take on.
THE KATES HILL PRESS
Believes the west midlands is an area rich in culture which local people and outsiders want to read about.
Check out our
links page listing poetry groups, local history groups, theatre groups, and musicians.
What is a Small Press?
Small Presses operate on the principle that a small audience is better than no audience.
The Kates Hill Press brings the tradition of providing a first platform for writers to the west midlands.
A Little Known Fact:
Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, T S Eliot, James Joyce, Paddy Doyle...
To name a few, were all published by Small Presses at first.
SMALL
PRESS - GRAND THEMES
The Kates Hill Press produces works of substance. A Witness For Peace and
Ghost Voices deal with world themes.
SOMETHING
FOR EVERYONE
Most Black Country books are about nostalgia for times gone by, or about a time
and place that has never existed. The Kates Hill Press has titles which
look back with fondness like A Pocketful of Memories; that look back with
realism like The Sportsman and The Hairy Mouse, as well as titles that are hard
hitting and reflect more recent and current times like The Gulf.
BRIEF HISTORY OF THE KATES HILL PRESS
:
The Kates Hill Press was set up in 1992 by Greg and Carol Stokes as a vehicle for
"A Witness For Peace", Greg's book chronicling the murder of his father in the aftermath of Ronald Reagan's war on terrorism.
Black Country Stories and Sketches was brought out in 1992 as a practice run and Witness For Peace followed in 1994. The venture generated a lot of interest among local authors who sent synopses and letters by the dozen. Among them were Clarice Hackett and Tossie Patrick. Clarice's novel
The Sportsman was published in 1996 and Tossie's reminiscences of 1920s Blackheath saw the publication of our first booklet in 1998. In 2001 we added poetry to our catalogue and in 2002 Billy Spakemon became our first dialect poet with his
Chant of the Mutha Tung.
In 2004 the KatesHill press brought out Dud Dudley's Metallum
Martis and Amy Lyons' Black Country Sketches under the series title
Black Country Classics which will bring long out of print works to the modern
audience. As part of this venture the Kates Hill Press moved to comb
binding to enable us to print on demand and thereby broaden the catalogue. Black
Country Sketches, The Gulf, and The Hairy Mouse were produced in
rapid succession by this method. In 2005 Greg Stokes became involved in
live literature in Dudley first in Creative Cooperations (with Gary O'Dea and
Billy Spakemon,) and then with RoosterKateSpake (Billy Spakemon and Laurence
Hipkiss of Roosters Studio.) This latter association led to the
publication of the Kates Hill Press's first audio book on CD, The Grant by
Greg Stokes