yo, powe!

Here’s my redesign of the cover for James Baldwin’s short book of essays, The Fire Next Time.
Baldwin’s essay is an exploration of his own experiences with Christianity, the Nation of Islam, and how religion intersects with race in America. For me, it was a fascinating perspective on how religion often fails to support and realistically guide its practitioners. The book also does a great job of pointing the finger at complacent white groups, and how the black experience won’t improve until white people understand and actually do something about it.
I wanted this cover to be traditional, but I didn’t want it to blend in. The bright colors + the retro calligraphic typeface are meant to punch the viewer in the face, and the burning house references not only the couplet that the title is from (“God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water but fire next time”) but also the incendiary content of the essays.
It’s a short book with only two essays in it and it’s incredibly relevant to today’s political landscape. If you’ve read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me (which is a title ripped from the pages of Baldwin’s essay!) this is a great next step.

Here’s my redesign of the cover of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. Originally published in the US in 1924, it’s considered one of the grandfathers of the futuristic dystopian genre, paving the way for 1984, Brave New World, and The Hunger Games.
We is a novel about a society so obsessed with equality that citizens don’t even have names, just numbers. The destruction of the individual is seen as uniting: “We comes from God, I from the devil.” My goal was to create a cover that reflected this blind trust in the power of the group, and the dismay the main character (the mathematician and engineer, D-503) feels when he is seduced by an illegal freedom terror cell.
One of my favorite scenes comes when D-503 is discussing the ideal society with his secret lover, the rebel I-330. D-503 believes that the government’s rigid regulations and perfectly ordered lives of its citizens represent the apex of civilization. I-330 asks him if he can name the highest number, and he can’t. She says that revolutions are like numbers—there is never a final revolution that results in a perfect society. Even the revolutionaries concede that even theirs will not be the final blow to tyranny, and that man will always keep struggling. It’s a weird, sad, hopeful moment, and makes the book completely worth the somewhat confusing middle act.

Here’s my redesign of Stephen Hawking’s 1988 masterwork, A Brief History of Time.
For having sold more than 10 million copies, this is a surprisingly dense book of science. Yes, the descriptions of black holes and particle physics are dumbed down from the dizzying impermeability of grad school classrooms so that we mortals can understand them, but they’re still dense as hell and make for difficult subway reading. I can honestly say I probably didn’t absorb over 60% of this book.
I wanted the cover of this book to be friendly and approachable, yet reminiscent of a science textbook. The prose is written in clear, informative, simply constructed sentences, and I wanted the design to reflect that in its geometry and clarity. The original cover of the book features an iconic portrait of Hawking, and his personality (and story) is a large part of why readers still pick up this book — preserving that in this edition was important to me.
If you, like me, haven’t taken a science class in a few years; I recommend picking this book up and bending your brain a little.

Here’s an alternate cover that I’ve made for Kai Ashante Wilson’s The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, a completely out-of-left-field and wonderful novella that contains high fantasy, ancient sci-fi, gay romance, and intra-cavalry jocularity.
I wanted the cover to convey two main things:
- The Sorcerer’s love interest is a demi-god and one of the most visual representations of that is his “hair that drinks the sunlight” and that can be seen form a distance—he has to keep it under a wrap in public, otherwise mortals will know.
- One of the coolest and most memorable parts about this book is that the characters are mostly black, and speak in an African-American dialect. (One reviewer said that the book is spiritually aligned with both Tolkien and Ghostface Killah, which makes total sense.) I wanted the hair to also reflect that.

Here’s my alternate take on the cover to Marcel Theroux’s 2013 sci-fi thriller, Strange Bodies.
The book hinges on the idea that someone has developed a process for reincarnating dead people using their writing as a way of mapping their thought processes. In the main plotline, Samuel Johnson is reincarnated in present-day London after his essays, novels, personal journals, and dramas are put through what the author ominously calls The Process. The protagonist is then called upon to confirm that the newly-made man is indeed Samuel Johnson through handwriting analysis and literary comparison.
Because of how The Process works, I wanted the cover to have a strong tie to pens, handwriting, tattooing, and continuity. That’s why this cover is all drawn with one line, and why it’s a little messy, a little human. Anyone who’s in a new body has a specific tattoo - that’s why I inked this cover in someone’s skin.

I’m starting a new project where I illustrate the covers of books I’ve enjoyed!
Here’s the first one, for Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon.
Half military drama, half post-apocalyptic Twilight Zone survival story, Alas, Babylon is about what would happen if the Russians accelerated their rocket and missile research in the 1950s while the Americans struggled to keep up. An accidental, errant American fighter jet provokes the Russians to unleash nuclear weapons on nearly every major American city, reducing the country to a series of disconnected rural outposts. The plot centers on the small (fictive) town of Fort Repose, Florida, one of the only livable centers left in the contaminated state that is cut off from the rest of the country, and how the citizens try to make their way in a new, technology-less world.