Santa Fe Writers Project unveils the cover of Rabha Ashry’s memoir Hope You Still Love Me

Santa Fe Writers Project has revealed the cover of Rabha Ashry’s memoir Hope You Still Love Me, which is scheduled for publication on May 4, 2027. The design, created by Laura Waltje with photography by Elizabeth A. Rosales, introduces a memoir that moves between exile, mental illness, and the search for a home that can be built rather than inherited.

The book follows Ashry after she leaves the United Arab Emirates, where she was living under the pressure of a narcissistic mother and an increasingly suffocating home life. She heads to Chicago seeking asylum and the possibility of a more loving life, but the journey is repeatedly interrupted by manic episodes, hospitalizations, and a long struggle to find treatment that works. The memoir presents that path as both intimate and political: a queer, bipolar Arab woman trying to survive while also trying to define belonging on her own terms.

Hope You Still Love Me is described as a lyrical account of survival and self-making, tracing the emotional and practical costs of fleeing one life in hopes of creating another. Its central concerns include language, identity, family, and the fraught difference between the home one is born into and the home one has to assemble from scratch. The memoir frames home as something unstable and changing — at once refuge, trap, escape route, and hard-won creation.

The newly revealed cover reflects that same blend of rupture and reconstruction. Waltje, who has known Ashry for years and collaborated with her on visual projects dating back to college, drew on material from across Ashry’s life to build the design. Elements include artwork Ashry made during her first manic episode, a wedding photograph, line art based on her tattoos, flowers collected from Waltje’s garden, and collaged textures that echo the duo’s earlier zine work.

That shared visual history is central to the cover’s meaning. Ashry and Waltje met in college in the UAE and later created zines together under the name Second Draft Press, using scans of Polaroids, torn images, magazine fragments, typewritten text, fabric, and flowers. The cover continues that language, pairing layered handmade textures with a stark central image and a palette that connects directly to Ashry’s memoir. Rather than presenting a polished or distant image of the book, the artwork functions as an extension of its narrative world.

The author has said the cover is especially personal because it incorporates evidence of both her madness and her healing. The wedding photo, taken in Waltje’s house, and the childhood image on the back cover help anchor the memoir’s movement from a difficult biological family toward a chosen one. The design also connects visual motifs to specific events in the book, making the cover not just promotional material but part of the memoir’s storytelling.

Waltje, who works as in-house cover designer and production editor for Sentient Publications, developed the concept while Ashry was writing the memoir. Santa Fe Writers Project ultimately accepted the proposed design, turning the collaboration into a formal part of the book’s presentation. With the cover now public and preorders open, Hope You Still Love Me begins its approach to publication as a memoir grounded in personal history, artistic collaboration, and a search for a place to belong.