Mansi Dahal‘s debut poetry collection, Women in Marigold, moves from Kathmandu to New York City, from Saeeda Bai to Sylvia Plath, confronting the tension between life as a daughter in Nepal and a future as an artist in America.
Women in Marigold will be published on September 22, 2026, by Stillhouse Press and is available for preorder now.
Mansi Dahal is a writer from Biratnagar, Nepal, and a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program, where she was awarded the Waletzky Fellowship from the School of the Arts for her distinguished work. Women in Marigold is her debut poetry collection.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Women in Marigold, featuring a photograph by Tirtha Lawati, along with a Q&A with Dahal about its creation.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
I wanted it to embody the in-betweenness the manuscript has, a life lived between cultures, languages, cities, and selves. The instability, yes, but also the reaching aspect of it. I wanted it to be red, and I wanted it to be feminine. I wanted it to be loud and scream Nepali, but in a more embodied way. South Asian literature in the U.S. is often flattened into narratives dominated by Indian experience (and I acknowledge being Indian is not a monolithic experience and that there is a huge Nepali population that lives in India when I say this), leaving Nepali histories and textures underrepresented. This means I navigate a double invisibility: outside the American literary center and peripheral within a broader regional identity that is frequently homogenized. And if I can only debut once in this lifetime, I wanted it to be the Nepali cover I never saw walking into any American bookstores all my life.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
I had provided a description and a moodboard to my publishing team earlier in the process. But the process took a turn when I saw Tirtha’s photo, I just knew that it had to be my book cover. If my manuscript could be captured in a photo, it had to be that, and it was done by a person whom I had never met, who had no idea that my manuscript even existed. His photo made me realize a lot of our hearts have been thumping with the same desire of how we want to carry home and heritage with us. I reached out to him with a potential collaboration, and then figured out the logistics through his agent, which was a very smooth process. As a Nepali poet and writer, I feel a strong responsibility to support and uplift the Nepali creative community as much as possible. It’s very important for me to advocate for Nepali artwork, photography, and writing whenever I can because historically we have rarely received global exposure.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
To see the book title and my name on the cover was surreal. I have dreamt of being a writer all my life, and sometimes the process of writing a book or living in this invisible phase of being a writer without an actual published manuscript can stretch on so long that you forget the end goal, or that one of the goals was to have a book out. Like the process had engulfed my belief that there was even a destination. So, seeing the cover finalized was like witnessing my
abstract-dreamy personality—that my Aama is always astounded by—taking a concrete shape, something I could soon hold in my hands and pass to her.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
In the photo, we see two young girls’ braids woven with lachcha, the red thread typically braided in the hair of a grown-up Nepali women. I saw lachchas dangling from the roots of my mother’s and grandmother’s hair, years before I threaded it in my own braid. Seeing the lachhas dangling in the young girls’ hair almost compressed the time from youth to adulthood for me. The photo was glossy with young Nepali girls’ desire to be women, their heads tilted up to the sky, with a finger pointing upwards, and a dragonfly resembling a tiny airplane. The dragonfly could have landed on its own a little after the finger was raised, or it might have always been there, or it might have been placed by somebody else. There is also a clear division between the sky and the rest of the white cloth; could that be earth? A background? Two selves? A bedsheet hung on a terrace that is fluttering in the air? A transition between two places? And then there’s the waterfall of flowers in the hair, the abundance of it, exactly how I grew up seeing my Hajurama walk, eat, sleep, with a basket full of flowers from her garden, the manifolds of the petals refracting the complexity of womanhood.