Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of A Holy Dread by R. A. Villanueva, which will be published on February 17th, 2026 by Alice James Books. You can pre-order your copy here.
Inspired by the poet’s identities as an educator, a son, and a Filipino American, A Holy Dread emerges out of questions, hopes, and unshakeable fears about the world we have created and the world our children will inherit.
Villanueva’s sophomore collection grapples with mortality, fatherhood, grief, and every-day life in the Anthropocene with formal balance and restraint. Intense, tight lyrics mirror the speaker’s reality: equal wonderment and worry, tenderness and calamity, beauty and sorrow.
These unrelenting poems—part prayer, part pleading—traverse the complexities of peril, faith, and fear with precision and bravery. The poems in A Holy Dread search for joy and hold it dear, even as things fall apart around us.
Here is the cover, designed by Tiani Kennedy with cover art by Carzen Arpa Esprela:
R. A. Villanueva: There’s about a decade between my first book, visuals, to turn toward cover designs, I found myself digging through drawers and shelves, searching for those books and their rhymes with, and A Holy Dread. In that time, I’ve continued a creative practice that’s sustained me through the attendant bewilderments and blessings of keeping alive: year after year, I carry a small, lined journal of notes and ephemera, quotes and sketches with me everywhere; in myriad ways, those commonplace books couple with the digital bookmarks I keep, and an ever-mutating folder synced to my devices named “Catalysts, &c.” where I drop paintings, PDFs, screenshots of group chats, scans of photographs, and more. The combination of those materials is charged with meaning, strangeness, brilliance, surprise.
The consistency and devotion to this wildly personal curatorial work has been a comfort for me—a way to remix the beautiful volatility of the world’s texts with my own fixations, my anxieties, and my ongoing desire to gather close and see anew.
So when the moment came to pair words with visuals, to turn toward cover designs, I found myself digging through drawers and shelves, searching for those books and their rhymes with with A Holy Dread. I eventually stacked them on the couch next to me, flipping through my doodles and lists, memories of gallery visits, lesson plans and lecture notes, diagrams and drafts.
I knew that I wanted the artwork to feature a Filipino painter. I wanted, too, for the image itself to call back to what I’ve been reckoning with across the body of my writing: the sacred and the mortal, the elegy and the praise song, the pressures of language and tradition, grief and gratitude.
With neon pink-fearlessness and heart, Carzen Arpa Esprela’s Full House (Ikot-ikot Po) brings dimension to all those hopes and hauntings. I was immediately drawn to the ghostly figures, their radiance and transcendence, their physicality and intimacy. They’re gathered on the front lawn, a family floating together and framed by luminous, all-caps, sans-serif type. I’m so thankful for the interplay of the title with the art—and how everything pulses with this affirmation from Sandra Cisneros: “We do this because the world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning.”
Tiani Kennedy: Designing the cover for A Holy Dread was an iterative and collaborative process. The artwork selected for the collection is visually rich; it’s full of movement, color, and layered symbolism. As a result, its complexity made it both inspiring and challenging to integrate clear, impactful typography. I explored several directions to understand how the image interacted with type and to align with the poet’s specific vision. As we refined concepts, we returned to an early idea with a clearer sense of what resonated. The final cover features bold, white typography that frames the haunting central imagery, ensuring legibility without sacrificing the artwork’s intensity. The result is a design that feels intentional and attuned to the emotional world of the poems.
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