Bobby Elliott’s debut poetry collection, The Same Man, was chosen by Nate Marshall as the winner of the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. It will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press on September 9, 2025. The collection is available for pre-order.
Elliott’s previous poetry can be found in The Cortland Review, Diode, North American Review, ONLY POEMS, Poet Lore, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. Earning his MFA from the University of Virginia, he was also a Poe/Faulkner Fellow and won the Kahn Prize for Teaching.
Debutiful is pleased to reveal the cover of Elliott’s debut (designed by Alex Wolfe) alongside a Q&A with the poet to get a behind-the-scenes look at how the cover came to be.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
For the most part, I was just focused on getting the poems, and the book, in shape. On some level, envisioning a cover felt like a step too far – an assumption that The Same Man would win a first book prize and enter the world – and I didn’t want to get ahead of myself.
At the same time, there’s nothing like a cover that’s an eyesore, right? And I knew that if The Same Man found a home, I’d want to be invested and engaged on the design from the start.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
Once the process began in earnest, I filled out a wide-ranging design questionnaire, which served as the foundation of our work on the cover. It asked me everything from the desired tone of the cover to potential imagery and concepts to work off of. From there, I kept in close touch with Alex Wolfe – Pitt’s Editorial and Production Director, the Managing Editor of the Pitt Poetry Series and a phenomenal book designer – as he dug into the manuscript and began exploring potential covers.
Towards the end of the process, Alex sent me four separate covers to choose from – an embarrassment of riches – and the team let me decide from there. It was a tough decision, but I was also buoyed by the sense that I couldn’t go wrong. Any of the four would have made for a great cover for The Same Man.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
It was both euphoric and surreal. Part of that, of course, is seeing your name for the first time, but the other, more meaningful part of the experience is seeing a visual representation of what the book’s up to. What drives it. What consumes it.
To me, what someone like Alex is capable of doing is alchemical. I spent the whole week walking around with the cover printed out in a folder. I’d open it from time to time and be in awe all over again. I still am.
How does the cover work to convey what the contents of the story are?
What I love most about this cover – beyond the sheer beauty of it – is how much it manages to hold.
The Same Man is about fatherhood – the poems wrestle with the relationship between the speaker and his father while also chronicling the experience of becoming a father – and this is established beautifully and directly by the shadowed figures at the bottom of the cover. But those figures contain plenty: I see myself as a boy – looking out at the sea with my own father – while also seeing myself as a father sitting beside my son. This doubling is something the poems are constantly confronting and trying to make sense of. That Alex’s cover managed to pull that off is a genuine creative feat.
The ocean – something we talked about early on in the design process – is a site of both refuge and danger in The Same Man. Here, it’s almost painfully alluring in its shallows and increasingly unknown as it extends, and deepens, beyond the reaches of the cover. And that feels just right for a book that’s caught between so much joy and so much trouble.