Grace Spulak is a writer and attorney based in her home state of New Mexico with an MFA from Warren Wilson, who will be releasing her debut story collection, Magdalena Is Brighter Than You Think, from Autumn House on April 21, 2025. Magdalena is set largely in New Mexico and explores the complexities of gender, queerness, trauma, and resilience.
Debutiful is honored to reveal Magdalena Is Brighter Than You Think‘s cover, designed by Connie Amoroso, with art from Joel Becktell, along with a Q&A with Spulak about its creation.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
I wanted the cover to convey the New Mexico landscape that forms the backdrop of so many stories in this collection, a cover that felt both a little harsh, yet full of possibility. I grew up in New Mexico and spent many years driving through rural New Mexico when I worked as an attorney representing children and young people, watching the landscape and taking hope from its strange beauty: the way it looks dead on first glance, the way living things take surprising colors—yellows and browns instead of the expected greens—the way flowers bide their time for rain, ready to burst into violent and riotous color at the first drop of moisture. My connection to landscape helped me understand the resilience and unexpected transformations that my characters experience, and it was important that the cover represent this in some way.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
It was the easiest thing about this book! The cover came together so seamlessly thanks to the very talented people who created it. The cover artwork is a painting by my spouse, Joel Becktell, who is a professional artist. Having the cover of my debut book use an original artwork by someone who has meant so much to my writing makes this cover feel particularly special. And the designer, Connie Amoroso, did such a wonderful job of selecting an artwork of Joel’s that conveys the harshness and possibilities of these stories and taking it from artwork to book cover. She highlighted just the right elements of this artwork and made it interact with the title and other cover text in a way that feels seamless and perfect.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
Surreal. It made the book feel real and cohesive in a way that it hadn’t before! A story collection is a little different than a novel, as there’s no unifying story-line to hold the pieces together. Much of the commonalities of these stories are in the New Mexico settings and the way the landscape provides strange hope and comfort. And I think the cover really speaks to that.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
The book is about queer and poor people in rural New Mexico who find unexpected connections and hope in the midst of violence and isolation. For me, this cover image reflects the intersection of violence and transformation that sits at the heart of so many of these stories. The wash of red under the open sky feels both dangerous and life-giving. The textured canyons at the bottom of the image, the mix of browns and greens, represent the way that desert life is both strange and resilient, emerging and surviving in the most unexpected places, just like the characters in this collection.