A Handbook of American Prayer

For this title, the publisher wanted a jacket design with literary and also somewhat dark qualities. After getting to know the book’s protagonist—a man who goes to jail for murder, becomes a prison shaman, and performs “miracles” with saucy, unreligious zeal—I decided to make the cover look like an actual prayer book object with an edge. For illustrations, I chose two props from the story that let the reader know this is not your average religious volume.