Sanam Sheriff is a queer poet from Bangalore, India. Their debut poetry collection, HUM, won the Backwaters Press Poetry Prize and will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in October, 2026. It is available for preorder now.
The word “hum” in Urdu can mean both “we” and “I”. In English, it’s a gesture of sound—a vibration. HUM features poems that follow queer, trans, Muslim speaker who grew up in southern India and migrated to the United States, and is a trans call to the beauty of attempt rather than the clarity of arrival.
Sanam has received support from the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, Kundiman, Tin House, the Fine Arts Work Center, Brew & Forge, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and The Watering Hole. They currently live in Philadelphia, where they curate The Poets’ Studio at Twelve Gates Arts.
Debutiful is honored to reveal HUM‘s cover, designed by Lindsey M. Welch, along with a Q&A with Sheriff about its creation.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look
like?
While writing HUM, I moved from one poem to the next, not thinking of the book as an object in the world. It was only after the manuscript had taken shape—and I was able to see it in its longer form—that I turned toward the question of a cover.
There is a rare feeling of alignment and trust that sets in when a question in my mind is met with complete certainty—no hesitation, no doubt. As I closed my eyes to visualize the cover for HUM, a single photograph rose to the surface. It is an image I love, taken by someone I love. I knew then that whatever came next would abide by this frame, potent and powerful as it was.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your
publishing team?
I let the press know, via my Author Information Form, that I had the photograph I wanted to use for the cover. I received word back that the design team was happy with the idea. When it was time, Lindsey, the lead designer, sent over a draft of what she had come up with.
I loved the fonts and colors that had been chosen for the text, but the overall layout wasn’t singing for me. We sent it back and forth a couple times and I nearly approved one design—feeling the pressure to finalize, the guilt of being too picky or particular. But something still didn’t feel right. I knew this cover would be the face of the work, and that this work had been a decade in the making. I wanted it to feel true, through and through.
That same day, I hopped onto my computer to play with the design in the hopes that something would click. To my surprise, it did. I felt like I had tapped into the thing I was missing, and the logic behind it made sense. I sent the experiment along to Lindsey, anxious about overstepping, not wanting to undercut her expertise. I am fortunate that she welcomed the collaboration. She is the kind of designer who cares about creating covers that truly serve the work. She refined the concept and sent it back. This time, it sang.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
A blue joy. The game-winning shot. The clarity of yes. A faithful place.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
HUM is a book of distance and intimacy, longing and belonging. It is queer, trans, and devoted to that divinity. It pushes away from shame and toward the erotic. Written from the threshold of a liminal life, it dwells in the in-between as a place unto itself. For me, a body suspended in the vastness of water and sky holds all of this. Taylor Johsnon—dear friend, beloved poet—says it better: “Desire is a blue dimension.”
The insider scoop on the cover is that the original photograph, taken by Fatoumata Sylla, has been edited to alter the outline of the nude body in the frame. This, to me, is a trans praxis—embracing disorientation, rejecting purity, rearranging form. These are the spaces from which HUM sings.
Ultimately, I hope this cover begins to ask the central questions the poems hold: What does it take to go beyond the body’s shape, to look back at the land you come from and have left behind?