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Includes Caroline Kurtz’s award-winning memoir A Road Called Down on Both Sides, Winner of the Presbyterian Writers Guild’s Best First Book Award, and her follow-up memoir Today is Tomorrow
In A ROAD CALLED DOWN ON BOTH SIDES, Caroline explores her childhood in the remote mountains of Maji, Ethiopia in the 1950s, raised by missionary parents. After struggling to find “home” in the United States, Caroline returns to her beloved Maji as an adult to teach, only to realize it may have been better just to treasure the memories.
In TODAY IS TOMORROW, Caroline and her husband begin working with civil war refugees in South Sudan and Kenya. Plagued by the ghosts of her past, a failing marriage, and a deep sense of self-inefficacy, Caroline battles with the impact of her work, and finds extraordinary grace within a war-torn people.
“[A] unique, historically informed perspective on a fascinating nation.” —Kirkus Reviews
"I finished this gripping story in a couple sittings because I wanted to know, badly, what would come of this remarkable girl raised on a ridge between two very different worlds. […] This is a lyrical rendering of life lived on a fault-line between cultures, where accepted beliefs grind together and sometimes collapse." —Tim Bascom, author of Chameleon Days and Running to the Fire
"A very interesting memoir worth sharing with a global audience.” —Dr. Worku L. Mulat, President of Ethiopian Institute of Resilience and Climate Change Adaptation, honorary professor at Wollo University and research associate at The Tree Foundation
"[H]ugely anthropological, historical, cultural and Spiritual.”— Bishop Dr. Arkanjelo Wani Lemi, Former Presiding Bishop of Africa Inland Church, Former Chair of the South Sudan Council of Churches, Chair of the Technical Committee for establishment of the Truth, Reconciliation and Healing Commission
“My African friends who read Today Is Tomorrow may wonder if such experiences of an American woman can be real. My American friends who read this may wonder if such experiences in Sudan can be anything but fiction. But knowing Caroline in America and working side-by-side with her in Sudan, I can say that the realities she describes with such sublime word pictures are all real. [Kurtz] is an artistic wordsmith.” — Bill Lowrey, Facilitator of Wunlit (South Sudan) People-to-People peace conference
"[R]eal, raw and truly a sacred story... Kurtz shares her personal vulnerability with readers, creating not just an intellectual exploration of cross-cultural differences, but rather a heart-wrenching witness of what it means to give one’s whole life...not knowing whether one’s hopes or intentions will be realized." — Rev Dr. Sue Hudson, The Presbyterian Outlook
From the age of five, Caroline Kurtz grew up in Ethiopia, the child of Presbyterian Church missionaries. The family lived in the church’s most remote mission station in the mountainous regions of southwestern Ethiopia near the town of Maji. From age ten, Caroline attended boarding school in in Addis Ababa and then Alexandria, Egypt, then left for college in the United States at eighteen, unprepared for U.S. culture. She eventually married a childhood sweetheart, also the child of American missionaries to Ethiopia, and the couple returned with their family to live and work in Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Sudan. She and her sister, the American children’s author Jane Kurtz, recently launched Ready Set Go Books for early Ethiopian readers. Ready Set Go has now printed and distributed 70,000 books in Ethiopia. When her husband died in 2013, Caroline bought, gutted and remodeled a house in Portland, Oregon. From there she returns regularly to Ethiopia, bringing solar power and economic development options to women in Maji.
Book 1: A Road Called Down on Both Sides: Growing up in Ethiopia and America
Book 2: Today is Tomorrow