Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Hope You Still Love Me by Rabha Ashry, which will be published on May 4, 2027 by Santa Fe Writers Project. You can pre-order your copy here.

Rabha Ashry is losing her mind.

Fleeing her narcissistic mother and the suffocating cage of her home life in the UAE, Ashry must leave behind her sisters to seek asylum in Chicago on a search for a new, loving home. But she finds herself in and out of psych wards, suffering again and again from manic episodes, and on too many pills that don’t work.

In this searing, lyrical memoir, Ashry maps the geography of her survival. From the manic highs and crushing lows of bipolar disorder to the uncertain, frightening journey of seeking asylum, Hope You Still Love Me explores a queer, bipolar Arab woman’s search for acceptance and belonging, and what it takes to heal. A profound exploration of language and self, of cultural and personal identity, and the journey of exile and homecoming.

Home is a story. Home is a trap. Home is a way out. Hope You Still Love Me traces the journey of a girl lost in lights and stars and down side streets, tangled in spider webs, seeing the world behind the world, as she navigates the tension between the family we are born into and the family we build from scratch. When we finally stop running, home isn’t a place you return to—it’s a place you fight to create.

Here’s the cover, designed by Laura Waltje, with photography by Elizabeth A Rosales:

Rabha Ashry: Laura and I have been creative collaborators for the 13 years we have known each other. Some of my fondest memories in college are of us running around the mixed arts studio making art, collaging and scanning and printing on different kinds of paper. My favorite thing about the cover is that it captures our style of visual art and the enthusiasm with which we made it. When Laura offered to take a shot at the cover, inspiration hit and it came together in a way that reminded me of how exhilarating it feels to work in a medium other than writing. Laura’s skill and artistic vision make this cover stunning. I personally can’t stop looking at it. Every few days I pull up the cover on my phone to gaze at it as though it is a photograph of a beloved child.

Hope You Still Love Me is a book about madness and healing, and this cover features relics of my madness, and evidence of my healing. It is deeply personal and intimate. The backdrop art piece is one that I created during my first manic episode 10 years ago, my first venture into the world beyond the world. The photograph was taken by Elizabeth A Rosales for my wedding, which took place in Laura’s house. The cover also features line art Laura created out of my tattoos, and scanned flowers I collected from Laura’s garden, as well as tracing paper in the same style of the scanned collages we made in college. Laura combined the different elements so seamlessly, and each part of the cover is directly tied to an event that takes place in the book. I love that this cover speaks to our years of friendship, as much evidence of my chosen family as it is a product of my life experiences.

Laura Waltje: I am longtime friend and collaborator of Rabha Ashry. We met in college in the UAE about a decade ago where we both studied creative writing and lived across the hall from each other. Our friend group covered Rabha’s dorm room walls in wild black scribbled drawings and collaged pornographic and artistic images of naked women on Rabha’s coffee table. Rabha and I further developed our shared visual language when we created and published a series of zines as “Second Draft Press.” We used a lot of scans of polaroids, printed and torn images, magazines, type written text, and fabric and flowers. The visual language we developed parallels Rabha’s writing: highly energetic, using fragments/vignettes, confessional in its rawness, but very intentional in its placement, arrangement, and elements.

I work as the in-house Cover Designer and Production Editor for Sentient Publications, so as Rabha wrote the book, I could not help but start dreaming about a cover that captured her striking writing style and her narrative arc. Santa Fe Writers Project kindly allowed me to take a stab at creating a cover for Hope You Still Love Me and ultimately accepted the cover I proposed.

In order to create the cover, I wanted to pull from that visual language Rabha and I had developed together and draw on elements that mapped Rabha’s journey in this book. The pink background, with the black central image, and the green oil pastels comes directly from an artist book Rabha created during the time of the first manic episode in the book. The front cover features a picture of Rabha in her wedding dress (she got married in my living room) while the back cover features a small image of Rabha dressed up like a doll by her mother in a little wedding dress. The ghostly butterfly wings behind her on the back cover, the flower illustration on the front cover, and the smoke drifting from her joint are three of Rabha’s tattoos. By using the picture of Rabha as a small child, the art Rabha created during that first manic episode, the tattoos that she grounded herself with, and the photograph from her wedding, the cover mirrors the journey of the book from biological to chosen family in a visual style that captures the searing, lyrical energy of Rabha’s writing.

I am honored not only to be able to continue to collaborate artistically with Rabha, but also to be a part of the chosen family that she creates in the book.