I was very excited when Turner Publishing first approached me to design the cover for The Escape of Light, by Fred Venturini. The initial brief sounded fascinating and I was eager to dig into the story. I must admit though, that in the midst of my excitement, I felt a twinge of uncertainty. The Escape of Light is a literary YA book, and having worked exclusively in adult literature, I didn’t feel experienced in this area, and was not entirely confident that I could create a successful design with a younger audience in mind. But my excitement and desire to work within the story eclipsed any hesitance.

Feast Your Eyes by Myla Goldberg is an arresting and deeply compelling novel. It tells the story of Lillian Preston—a single mother and photographer searching for artistic recognition in 1950s New York City—and is formatted as if it were a catalogue of notes from a posthumous MoMA exhibition of her work. The “catalogue”, written largely in the voice of Lillian’s daughter Samantha, describes her mother’s life, including a show at a small gallery early in Lillian’s career where a display of partially nude photos of a young Samantha leads to obscenity charges, Lillian’s arrest, and mother and daughter becoming a lightning rod for national scrutiny and scorn. I was mesmerized by Feast Your Eyes immediately so was simultaneously incredibly grateful to my art director, Jaya Miceli, for giving it to me, and terrified at the thought of not doing it visual justice.