Lupe Nero

The editors at Poetry magazine are ever grateful for the work of our cover artists and art directors at Winterhouse—and this month we’re lucky from someone else’s loss. When we asked February cover artist Adam McCauley to write a few words about his cover illustration, and his work in general, he responded:

As for that "Lupo Nero" piece, it has a rather mundane background I'm afraid. Alex [Knowlton] asks for work that is personal, so what I have shown him is a combination of stuff that is simply self-generated or originated from assignments, but weren’t used. In this case, I worked on a project for an Australian beverage company—a label for a sports drink there, down under [Boca Lupo]. The little wolf was one of many wolves that I drew for the project, and I've never seen the final label, although I know they used another one besides this…in that industry, things get shifted and killed all the time. Anyway, later on I put the wolf in the trees, just goofing around.

More recently McCauley completed a children’s book called The Monsterologist: A Memoir in Rhyme, written by poet Bobbi Katz. Here’s a poem about a werewolf, and a vegetarian ogre:

And here are some monster stamps, which make up the endpapers for the book—and also won McCauley a gold medal from the Society of Illustrators. (His April 2010 cover, "Tip-jar Angel," was recently accepted to the Society of Illustrators Annual Exhibition.)

The book itself was accepted to AIGI’s 50 Books/50 Covers show at the AIGA National Design Center. Below, you can see what all the fuss is about!