See the cover for Make Your Way Home by Carrie Moore

Carrie Moore‘s short stories have appeared in One Story, New England Review, The Sewanee Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Now, her debut short story collection Make Your Way Home is being published by Tin House on July 15, 2025! It is now available for pre-order.

The collection takes place across the American South and features Black men and women at different stages of age, happiness, and stability. From a pregnant young girl to a man grappling with a century-long curse, Moore invites readers into their lives with well-drawn portraits that don’t shy away from the complexity of their choices and emotions.

Debutiful is pleased to give a first look at the phenomenal cover of Make Your Way Home, which uses Higher Calling by Uzo Njoku as the centerpiece for the cover that was designed by Beth Steidle, Tin House’s Director of Design and Production. See the cover below and get a behind-the-scenes look at how it came to be.

While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?

I imagined two possibilities! My deepest desire for this collection was to reflect a diversity of Black Southern life. I even made an invisible rule that some stories had to exist in argument with one another, had to resist framing Blackness and Southern-ness within a single definition. There’s a story set in the distant past and another in the distant future. There’s a story set in the Texas Hill Country and another on St. Simons Island and others in cities of varying sensibilities. So for a long time, I pictured the cover as a collage of images, sort of like the designs for Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House or Alisa Alering’s Smothermoss. I thought that would capture the collection’s span.

And yet— I attempted to unite every story by way of emotional intimacy. Many feature subtle romances or sibling dramas or relationships between children and their ancestors. As a result, I also imagined a quiet cover that encouraged inner reflection. Something like Megan Gabrielle Harris’ stunning painting for Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ Promise could have really worked.

Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?

Tin House is such a phenomenal press. We had a few initial emails where I described elements I was interested in—a green background, stylized African-American figures, an image of peaches to match one of the stories—and we went through a few different iterations. All of the art was beautiful, but I wanted to be careful not to traffic in preexisting ideas about the South. In these stories, I’m writing against traditional assumptions about the region, such as that it’s stuck in the past or that it’ll always have a veneer of the mystic or Antebellum. I didn’t want “the idea of the South” to dominate people’s specific and nuanced experiences with place.

The Tin House team really heard me and came up with this amazing design. They used peach lettering in lieu of actual peaches, and they also arranged the title so the reader’s eyes travel down the image. I adored their vision.

What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?

I gasped out loud. In the writing community, you hear stories about authors who hate their covers or who wrestled with publishers to make compromises. When my editor, Elizabeth DeMeo, showed me the image for Make Your Way Home, I thought: Oh, I want to buy that book! Wait. That’s my book! It was greater than anything I imagined. I’m grateful to the designer, Beth Steidle, and the artist, Uzo Njoku, for their incredible work.

How does the cover work to convey what the contents of the book are?

The woman’s hands and eyes reflect an inner conflict. Similarly, the characters in these stories struggle with what home means to them. They’re always asking, Why do I long to go back, given what happened before? Yet despite this struggle, the cover figure is composed. She’s gotten out of bed and put on her lipstick and styled her natural hair. Though she’s working through something, she’s still doing her best to show up for the life she has.

The background also hints at the amount of “green” in this collection. In my stories, I explore different Southern landscapes: mountains and farmland and even suburban backyards. The final cover links my stories through multiple shades of green.

It’s the best of what I imagined: reflective and expansive, at once.