Brian Gyamfi’s debut poetry collection, What God in the Kingdom of Bastards, will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press on September 9, 2025. The collection is available for pre-order.
Gyamfi is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, the Zell Fellowship at the University of Michigan, two Hopwood Awards, the Helen S. and John Wagner Prize, and the Michael R. Gutterman Award. He has been a finalist for the Poetry International Prize, the Oxford Poetry Prize, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the Hopwood Drama Award, and the National Poetry Series.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Gyamfi’s debut, designed by Alex Wolf, alongside a Q&A with the poet, offering a behind-the-scenes look at how this powerful cover came to life.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
Yes, I did. I didn’t have a specific image in mind, but I kept returning to a mood—a sense of starkness and stillness. I imagined something minimalist, evocative of silence but full of gravity. I wanted the cover to feel like it was hovering at the edge of isolation, the way so many of the poems in the book do. I also wanted it to hold a certain beauty—something that felt intimate and wide all at once.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
It was thoughtful and deeply collaborative. My editor and the design team asked about my vision early on—what I imagined aesthetically, what colors or textures resonated with the manuscript, and even what book covers I admired. When the mock-ups arrived, I was struck by how seriously they’d taken those early conversations. Each option reflected a different emotional valence of the book, and the process of choosing felt less like picking a favorite and more like asking: which truth do we want to lead with?
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
Honestly, it was emotional. Cover 1—the one we ultimately chose—was almost exactly what I had been picturing, without realizing it. There’s something surreal about seeing the interior life you’ve spent years with rendered visually for the world. It made the whole thing feel real in a way it hadn’t before. I just sat with it for a while. It felt like a home for the poems.
How does the cover work to convey what the contents of the story are?
The cover carries the tension between restraint and intensity that runs throughout the book. It’s visually quiet, but not passive—it’s a garland of trees. That mirrors the work happening inside the poems: deviance, life, hauntology. There’s a kind of quiet persistence in both the visual and the verbal. The cover doesn’t give everything away, but it sets the tone—it gestures toward the interior without revealing it entirely.