Giving good cover

I enjoyed making this cover for All Screwed Up, a memoir by the very talented Steve Fellner. It is almost finished. I met Steve after I designed the cover for his first book, Blind Date With Cavafy, which won the 2006 poetry prize at Marsh Hawk Press and the 2008 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry. He liked it enough to ask his new publisher, Benu Press, to please use me to design this book too. And they did. You gotta read Steve. He's smart, funny, and gets your attention. He grew up some in trailers; bowling, adoption, and being gay all added to his crazy childhood misadventures. So I made a real mobile out of corrugated cardboard using a red hanger, clip art (touched up), and glitter. Jim cut the letters out with a pocket knife. The back cover was made in photoshop by merging several photos. The mobile is twinkling in my living room.

I still have the paper cup I used to create Steve's other cover. I found the cup in a gutter in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn when I was with a photography class taking shots at twilight. I put the cup on the hood of a car and snapped it. Then I redrew the image in the coffee cup to be guys holding hands. That part I did in illustrator and then merged it in photoshop with the photo I'd taken.

I wonder if he will want something other than a paper product for his third cover?