🏵️COVER REVEAL🏵️
@debutiful has the behind-the-scenes info on how the cover for WOMEN IN MARIGOLD by Mansi Dahal (@_roughdraft ) was created!
The debut poetry collection is set to release on September 22, 2026, by @stillhousepress . The cover features photography by Tirtha Lawati (@tirthrabinlawati ).
Head to Debutiful.net to read a Q&A with Dahal about how the cover was created.
#graphicdesign #novel #book #coverart #debutiful
I’m sharing this news with a strange mix of joy and disbelief that my debut poetry collection: WOMEN IN MARIGOLD, will be published in September 2026 by the brilliant team at @stillhousepress
Though being a poet has always felt like a private truth to myself (maybe even the truest center of who I am), in a world full of global disorder and chaos I keep asking: How to be a writer during these times? How to keep faith in language when it feels both urgent and inadequate?
This book for now carries some threads of what I’ve always longed to write. And moving forward I hope I’ll find the courage to say what needs saying and keep believing that language, even in its limit, can offer something.
Asha Bhosle sings, “You don’t know what’s ahead of you; you don’t know what was behind. Whatever it is, it is this moment.” To the month of just living for the month, writing in friends living rooms and kitchens and dining tables and floating and dreaming and daydreaming. 🍭💭
Things that kept me sane in this brutally cold month 🪭:
1. Ruth Asawa’s exhibition @themuseumofmodernart
2. Writing sessions @landtoseanyc
3. James Turrell’s skyspace @momaps1 🪂
4. Pandan Coconut iced latte @kinhfolk with @aliceevelynyang ‘s debut
5. Larissa Pham in conversation with Jamie Hood @booksaremagicbk
6. Vaginal Davis’s iconic desk
7. Japanese Breakfast @okonomi_yujiramen 🧂
8. Finally reading: The Year of Magical Thinking
9. @h_mohsin99 ‘s life-changing Bombay toast
10. @harsheeyss playlist at @snvvfkin ‘s living room. Sound or shelter? 🪩
11. Four women yelling across a busy bar.
12. Su-chefing for @bakingandmoshkari . White cake with brown-butter-sugar🍥
The only yearly wrap I have to offer is a landscape of my favorite writing spots:
1. The tall leather chair under that forgiving yellow light and the slim steel-legged desk. Portland, Maine.
2. The arched window overlooking Bouddhanath Stupa. Can’t slack in front of those unblinking eyes of Buddha. Kathmandu, Nepal.
3. A desk I call a writer’s dream. Trees swaying through the tall transparent windows, the chiaroscuro of light doing what it always does. Kalimpong, India.
4. A partitioned desk beside a stubborn old TV and a dusty DVD player. The furnitures always know how to pose. Music Library, Columbia University, New York.
5. To be Nepali means living next to the destructions and then the construction. Buildings and then rebuilding. Patan, Nepal.
6. The library stacks, chilled and dim, where I always wished to be wilder than my predictable rituals. Butler Library, New York.
7. Aftermath of a birthday: wilting bouquet and a lit scented candle. Harlem, New York.
8. Tall conifers interrupting the electricity poles. Off-frame: the mountains behind them, humbling everything. Lete, Nepal.
9. Aama’s tiny plant, a pile of books I told myself I’d finish in three months, and the spicy instant fish packets I carry in my purse everywhere. Biratnagar, Nepal.
10. Small flowers on the tables and baristas who knew my cortado by heart. My most-frequented café of 2025: Sipsteria, Upper West Side, New York.
11 & 12. The same desk: one lit by the devotion of night work and another bathed in daylight. Sunflowers and H-Mart snacks shall be seen in my future acknowledgement page. Harlem, New York.
13 My residency chair in Maine, a moment for its pointed elbows. Portland, Maine.
Excerpts from a new piece: a hybrid of personal essay and a play review, out now in @michiganquarterlyreview Full piece linked in bio.
@mishachowdhury ‘s work has held me again and again, but last May, after watching Rheology, I found myself acting its scenes out for my friends, calling my parents to tell them about specific moments, and re analyzing parts with friends who live far away. Because everyone who understood me needed to understand this play. Nothing can capture the experience except being in the theater itself, but here’s my attempt.
