Locals, Jared Jackson‘s debut short story collection, explores friendship, family, belonging, and the complexities of growing up in working-class Hartford, Connecticut. Across eight interconnected stories, Jackson follows young people navigating love, grief, and survival in a city shaped by inequality, revealing the tenderness beneath their bravado and the bonds that hold communities together.
Jackson is a Hartford-born writer whose fiction has appeared in The Yale Review, Guernica, Kenyon Review, and The Best American Short Stories. Viking will publish Locals on May 18, 2027.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Locals, designed by Jason Ramirez and featuring “Knuckle Sandwich” by artist Lynthia Edwards, courtesy of Richard Beavers Gallery. Below, Jackson discusses the collaborative design process, the significance of the artwork’s fragmented imagery, and how the cover captures the collection’s exploration of childhood, identity, and community.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
I didn’t have anything too specific in mind, but I knew I wanted the cover to represent the community in the book in some way. Maybe through depictions of people who could be characters in the book. I wanted it to feel human and intimate, and full of color.
Like the title, I wanted the cover to be a starting point, an entry point into the world inside Locals. Before a reader opens to the first page, I wanted them to already feel like they’re being welcomed in. That they have a textured idea of what’s in store.
I also wanted it to be truly artful. The writing inside is its own work of art, of course, but I also wanted the physical book to live as an art object. Something distinct, striking, and compelling. The kind of book you want to pick up, hold, and keep on display.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
I’m sure this has been said before, but there are stories about authors who had minimal input or a difficult experience when working with their publishing team on a cover. That was not my experience. Ultimately, my team’s priority was that I had a cover I loved. I was fully supported and encouraged to share my ideas, and it was a collaborative process throughout.
Almost one year ago my editorial team of Allison Lorentzen and Sonia Gadre put together a document for me to begin adding images, existing book covers, and artists I like to begin building a mood board of sorts. I also spelled out the type of visual aesthetics I gravitate towards and thought might work for the cover given the book’s set of concerns. Months later we culled down this document to what we felt best represented the direction we wanted to go in and shared it with our Viking publisher and art director.
I feel fortunate to say that from there things moved quite quickly. Art director Jason Ramirez channeled my ideas, the essence of the book, and his own artistry to provide cover options that made the decision process easy and without much back and forth. Once the artwork was selected, which is from a piece titled Knuckle Sandwich by the artist Lynthia Edwards, and Jason designed the cover around it, we considered final elements—colors, typeset, sizing—over a couple of days and were done. We had our cover. I feel fortunate to have had all the folks mentioned, as well as my agent, Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, on my team to help make what could have been a challenging, or even disappointing, process not only seamless, but enjoyable.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
Seeing the final cover for the first time was satisfying. That’s the word. I’d been living with the stories in Locals for so long as a manuscript, just pages and words, and suddenly it had a face. And not just any face, but one that felt confident and assured, like it knew exactly what it was.
I didn’t just glance at it and move on. I sat with it. I zoomed in on the small details, then pulled back to take in the whole thing, then zoomed in again. And every time I came back to it, it settled in a little deeper. It felt more true with each look, until there was no question left in my mind that this was it. This was my book cover. What made me proudest was how it captured the world inside those pages. With this final element—a cover—settled, it felt like the book was finally ready to step out and introduce itself to readers, and I couldn’t have been more pleased with how it was going to do that.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
The cover of Locals captures the book’s heart through Edward’s collage of a young Black boy assembled from mismatched fragments: an oversized ear, eyes from different photographs, one small child’s hand and one heavy, perhaps grown man’s fist. That patchwork body reflects both the book’s linked story structure, in which characters are pieced together through the eyes of others, and its central concern with a community of working-class young folks in Hartford. That idea is sharpened by the huge, scuffed work boot thrust toward the reader—almost adult shoes on a child who isn’t ready for them. A visual representation of these kids who are forced to grow up too soon. One hand softly cups his face while his eyes stare straight out, a mix of innocence and frankness while he offers his fist to the reader, which echoes characters in the book who are brash on the surface and tender underneath. Finally, the bold red of “LOCALS” almost pressing down on the boy’s head seemingly acts like a stamp and evokes the good or bad labeling, depending on where you stand, that comes with the idea of that word and how it can be used. To me, the cover feels dynamic and works on multiple levels, and that was important to me.