Caleb Nolen is a poet whose work has appeared in 32 Poems, Bat City Review, Fence, The Georgia Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection, Afterlight, is set to debut on June 5, 2026, by University of Utah Press.
The collection, which won the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry, revisit the fraught adolescence of a group of boys growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover, which was designed by Jessica Booth with art from Mike Ousley, alongside a Q&A with Nolen about how it was created.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
I never thought about the cover while I was writing, but once I finished the manuscript I started to keep an eye out for art that I thought would fit. My wife is a visual artist and sends me things to look at sometimes and in 2021 she showed me some paintings by Mike Ousley. I had been sending out my book for about a year at the time (and had no idea I’d send it out another four!) and still didn’t really have any idea of what I wanted the cover to be. I was immediately drawn to Mike’s work and drove an hour and half to a gallery to see a couple of his paintings in person. They’re so good! I started following Mike on social media and in November of 2021 he posted the painting that we eventually used for the cover. I saved it to my phone as soon as I saw it because I knew that one day I was going to ask him if I could use it.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
I emailed Mike the week I found out my book had been selected and, after he said he was willing to figure it out with me, sent the press a screenshot of the painting. Mike was very gracious and the designer, Jessica Booth, was great. She figured out the text and put together two versions of the cover, one where the whole painting fit on the front and a second where part of the painting was on the front and part on the back. We ended up going with the second one.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
It’s even better than I imagined. I love the cover.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
Two of my friends from childhood died after we were adults and had lost touch. The center of my book are poems about that and the other boys I was friends with back then. I think the cover captures the feeling I have looking back. My friends and I spent a lot of time together in the woods at night and the woods at night can be scary and mysterious. The boys in the painting are playing but the actual scene doesn’t feel playful. There’s a feeling of unease in how the boys are all separate, how they aren’t looking at each other. It seems to me like the boy with the light feels this too, but the other boys don’t feel it yet. The text for the title has an almost medieval feel to it as well and a lot of my poems come out of my engagement with medieval Christianity.