Patricia Grace King, winner of the 2026 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, grew up in western North Carolina and has since lived in Spain, Guatemala, and the UK, where she now resides. Her short fiction has won the Miami University Novella Prize, the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, the Florida Review‘s Leiby Prize, and the Kore Press Fiction Award.
Her Drue Heinz-winning book, Those Who Vanish, features stories that follow martyrs, missionaries, guerrillas, and gringos across Central America to the Midwestern United States. This year’s judge says of the collection, “King’s unrelenting exploration of our need to survive while retaining our humanity propels these narratives into surprising and heart-breaking terrain.”
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of the story collection, designed by Alex Wolfe, alongside a Q&A with King about its creation.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
Not until recently did I think of this book as an actual book! For so long, it was just one short story after another. They accrued very slowly, though eventually I realized they were all in some way about Guatemala—a country where I lived on three different occasions throughout my 20s and 30s, and whose images haunted me. But I didn’t try putting these stories together as a single unit until the past couple of years. Because they came to me one at a time, and I worked on each story with the individual focus that it required, I can’t really say I ever had a book cover in mind.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
I’m now convinced I should keep a mood board or Pinterest page for all future projects! I came to this cover-design process with almost no plans or preconceptions and soon realized how much catch-up I had to do. The designer at U Pitt Press, Alex Wolfe, invited a lot of collaboration from me, including an extensive questionnaire and any images or sample covers I wanted to send him. It was a steep but exciting learning curve. It got me thinking about all the work that book covers do—how they signal genre category and intended audience as well as content and mood. In the end, I thought about some of my own favorite books—books that feel companionable to my writing—and whose covers had spoken to me. Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead, Euphoria by Lily King, and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being were all covers I looked to for models.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
Alex actually came up with six different cover options, and they were each thoughtful and striking, but as I first opened the file, this cover image leapt out. There was almost no choosing or even thinking involved; it was a visceral response. Just: This. This is the one. My book cover.
Book covers are such milestones, aren’t they? Like, “Wow, I’ve gotten this far!” and also: “My god, here we go. Forward to publication!” Seeing this gorgeous, evocative cover felt like both a culmination—of nearly 20 years’ worth of writing—and simultaneously a launching off.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
I’d suggested to Alex that the cover represent both presence and absence, beauty and horror. That’s what I see in the juxtaposition of these two images.
The warm pinks and oranges—as well as the bougainvillea flower itself, which blossoms across Central America—reflect the lushness and beauty of much of Guatemala. At the same time, I’m moved that Alex found and incorporated the sketch of a mass grave from the Guatemalan genocide, drawn by a member of the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG), an organization with whom I occasionally collaborated in my own work, and who contribute in such significant ways to the search for truth and the construction of justice in postwar Guatemala.
Captivating! Can’t wait to read it!
Love Love Love the cover! Absolutely stunning and perfect