Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Transplants” by Daniel Tam-Claiborne

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Transplants by Daniel Tam-Claiborne, which will be published by Regalo Press on May 13, 2025.

A harrowing and poignant novel following two young women in pursuit of kinship and self-discovery who yearn to survive in a world that doesn’t know where either of them belong. On a university campus in rural Qixian, Lin and Liz make an improbable pair: Lin, a Chinese student closer to her menagerie of pets than to her peers, and Liz, a Chinese American teacher grieving her mother’s sudden death. They’re each met with hostility—Lin by her classmates, who mock her for dating a white foreigner; Liz by her fellow English teachers, who exploit their privilege—and forge an unlikely friendship. After a startling betrayal that results in Lin’s expulsion, they swap places. Lin becomes convinced to pursue her degree at a community college near Liz’s Ohio hometown, while Liz searches for answers as to what drove her parents to leave China before she was born. But when a global catastrophe deepens the fissures between modern-day China and an increasingly fractured United States, Lin and Liz—far from home and estranged from themselves—are forced to confront both the familiar and the strange in each other. Unspooling over the course of a single extraordinary year in our not-yet-distant past and in small towns from Dandong to Deadwood, Transplants is a piercing story of migration, belonging, and the parts of ourselves that get lost in translation. Alternating between Liz and Lin’s perspectives, it is a lyrical and moving exploration of race, love, power, and freedom that illuminates the limits and possibilities of what can happen when we open ourselves to the unknown and reveals how even our fiercest differences may bring us closer than we might ever imagine.

Here is the cover, designed by Elisha Zepeda.

Author Daniel Tam-Claiborne: “The cover was going to be simple. A bilingual vintage encyclopedia for new immigrants to America. An anatomical woodcut of the heart from traditional Chinese medicine. A pair of lungs-turned-butterfly wings: a metaphor for survival and rebirth. Only, my heavy-handed suggestions were not translating well to the page (I’ve learned to never ask a writer about aesthetic design choices). My editorial team, which had patiently executed each of my failed visions, informed me that there was no time left for new directions.

On a lark, I went to social media. Unbeknownst to me, a burgeoning ecosystem of book cover designers was in full swing, perhaps none more eye-catching than Elisha Zepeda, whose process videos had already netted a devoted following. Determined not to repeat my previous mistake, my cold query to Elisha contained vanishingly little about the project save for the book’s summary. With a boldness that can only come with naivety and a turn-around deadline that would make anyone’s head spin, I figured I’d never hear back.

I was wrong. Not only did Elisha agree to mock-up a draft, but on the very first pass (which he modestly described as ‘throwing spaghetti on the wall’), he knocked it out of the park. I was immediately blown away by Elisha’s attention to detail. The collage approach was a brilliant way of rendering the novel’s diffuse subject matter. In addition to capturing the subtle textures of rural China and America, the image itself looks like the outline of a state or a province, another fitting touch for a book that centers so much on movement and migration. The underlying reality is actually more whimsical: the shape is derived from a layering of ‘cat head blobs,’ a subtle reference to a feline motif that I hadn’t even initially thought to include.

The blue hue feels hopeful, something that despite my own blinkered view of the world, remains true of my protagonists. Liz and Lin are the beating heart of this novel: two women whose lives intersect and supplant each other in myriad ways. Despite my initial reservations about having a female figure on the cover, what I perhaps love most about Elisha’s design is that it isn’t immediately legible whether the woman depicted is Lin or Liz (or even Liz’s mom). The idea of mutability that comes with the Chinese diasporic experience (the seemingly impenetrable distance between Chinese and Chinese American) is a central fascination of this novel, and one that this cover—in all its abstract and artistic splendor—pays incredible homage.”

Designer Elisha Zepeda: “Daniel sent me a synopsis and the manuscript, and after reading through that we both discussed similar literature Transplants could sit next to (Crying in H Mart, Severance, Pachinko, Past Lives…).

We wanted something that felt upmarket but approachable (my favorite genre to make covers for). I threw out the idea of a collage, which is my go-to solution for books that have a long list of themes and settings and elements. Trying to show all of those important parts may make the cover feel cluttered—but blending them into a collage tends to make it feel more cohesive and artistic.

I luckily found this wonderful photo of a woman’s face obscured by a flower. I leaned into that and asked Daniel for a list of key visuals/items. He provided an extensive list, and we landed on: a tea ticket, rice paddy, black cat, cat head shape, grain, and a peach blossom. That’s a lot of elements to place on a cover! But I think it landed somewhere really great. My favorite part is the cat legs resting perfectly in the shape of our character’s hair.”

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