Week 4: Old School, New Tricks

Old School Indian crushes the competition

Week 4 of the Book Jacket Bracket is a wrap!
Aaron John Curtis’s Old School Indian won by a landslide.

This win is particularly meaningful since the cover was adapted from a painting by Curtis’s uncle, Alex Jacobs.

On Instagram, Curtis said:

The first time I saw the cover mockup, I broke down crying. Of course, then I had to ask Uncle Alex for his permission. When he granted it, it seemed like fate. I feel blessed that my uncle—the artist I looked up to as a child, whose life served as a model for chasing my own dreams—gave me this cover.

Congrats to both Curtis and Uncle Alex for the well-earned win!

Week 5 Theme: Cut and Paste

This week celebrates the art of collage. These covers show us how assembling disparate styles can create a new and fascinating whole (there’s a cultural lesson in there somewhere).

Meet the Week 5 Contenders

• Boxcutters by John Chrostek (Malarkey Books, 5/20/25): Surreal, darkly funny, and biting. These stories teeter between satire and sincerity as everyday absurdities spiral into something much stranger.
• Making a Living by Rosalie Moffett (Milkweed Editions, 3/18/25): A sharp, tender collection exploring motherhood, capitalism, and modern rituals of survival with wit, grace, and spiritual defiance.
• Classic Crimes by Sarah J. Sloat (Sarabande Books, 5/20/25): A mischievous and inventive take on true crime. Erasure poems and collage transform the macabre into a realm of whimsy and sly delight.
• Archivist Scissors by Anne Waldman (Staircase Books, 4/29/25): A luminous collection weaving poetry, memory, and solidarity into a tapestry of love and community, from a legendary voice of lyrical resistance.

Voting is open until Sunday night. Tell your dental hygienist!

Screen to Shelf

Here’s something neat: The first weekly winner arrived on the shelves at Perelandra Bookshop in Fort Collins, as part of our Screen to Shelf program.

Huge shoutout to owner/poet Joe Deany-Braun for inviting the weekly winners into his highly selective collection.

What Voting Really Means

By translating internet silliness into real-world inventory, we are helping winning books land in the hands of actual human beings with eyeballs and brains and everything. This also means the authors will get money. And authors, despite popular belief, are also human beings who need money to eat. So voting is basically like feeding a human being in need. Or at least one of them. The other three are on their own. That’s the survival of the fittest I guess.

It reminds me of those dancing birds of paradise. Gotta dance to survive, right? At least the males do. The females get to sit back and simply pick their favorite. So basically what I’m saying is participating in this contest is like being a female bird of paradise. It’s procreative. But in a very different way.

Alright, I’m done.

Submit Your Favorite Covers

Have you seen a quality book cover recently?

Tap the contact button in the footer and let me know. I’m especially interested in new and upcoming covers from small presses. You never know what might make the bracket.

Thanks for Voting

You’re helping shine a spotlight on unique, beautiful, and under-the-radar books. I’m grateful. And I hope it’s fun.

Bravely into Week 5,

Will Pass
Book Jacket Bracket Guy