Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Spawning Season by Joseph Osmundson, which will be published on May 26, 2026 by Bloomsbury. You can pre-order your copy here!
NBCC and Lambda Literary Award finalist Joseph Osmundson chronicles his journey toward and away from parenthood to ask how we create and nurture queer families.
Since grade school, Joseph Osmundson dreamed of being pregnant. As he grew into the queer scientist he is today, the economic precarity of academia and the warming planet led to his decision not to reproduce. That is, until a couple he had known since college, two women, came to him with a proposition: would Joe be a bio-dad and would he co-parent alongside them?
Soon everything was falling into place. But when the two mothers communicated their need for a child to reflect their own racial backgrounds, Joe’s whiteness exposed fault lines in their parenting journey. Spawning Season is a genre-bending memoir that treats the scientific as integral to the personal and that builds an entire species of the grief we carry in our bodies. In exploratory prose that builds on the work of Donna Haraway and José Esteban Muñoz, Osmundson considers the ethics of child-rearing in the 21st century, the brutal wonder of caregiving, and the joys and intricacies of building family beyond biology.
Here is the cover, designed by Amanda Weiss:
Joseph Osmundson: I am open to a fault: breakups, depression, new crushes, anxiety, rumination. I text my friends. I post on Social Media. I share my writing in process. But one of the most profound experiences of my life is something almost no one knows about.
A few years ago, I almost had a kid. And then I didn’t have a kid.
Relief came through through nourishment and food and care. For the self, and for others.
And relief came through writing. Through turning something negative—loss, a not-child I could not hold in my hands—into an object with a spine. Not fingers, but pages. And she can speak.
The cover design by Amanda Weiss put an aesthetic to this book that I hadn’t even imagined. It feels familiar, with the image of that fish in the center. The closer I looked, the layers both revealed and complicated themselves. Rivers run through the fish, but also evoke erosion, destruction. In grayscale, the eye finds what might be a scientific image of mammalian reproduction.
Salmon, of course, are more familiar as food than ecology. I’m from Washington State where wild salmon imagery is abundant. In this book, though, ecology is nourishment. The planet is warming, and we are all part of the nature that may be destroyed.
It may be odd that a book about having a child by IVF includes words like brackish and riparian, but this book does. It may be odd that the worst of grief, and the quiet calm of a bone broth bubbling on the stove, and a “salmon cannon” brand called “Whooshh Innovations” all hold equal place in the story of my lost child, but they do.
The salmon-roe colored Trumpet Vine flowers remind me of the images that caught my eye on the worst days of my life, a beauty I almost resented but now believe kept me alive. Those layers seem reflected and refracted in the cover.
Like a salmon, I’d have died to have a child. I didn’t have a child and somehow I didn’t die. Spawning Season, out May 2026. A book with loss, yes, but much humor, so much care, and an ending, I hope, that reminds us that all children are our children, if only we treat them as such.
Amanda Weiss: I wanted the cover design to feel lively, while keeping in mind that the book does discuss the realities of climate change and our hope for the future.
The main cover image is of a salmon, and the salmon is an iridescent water texture, which feels a little unnatural, almost like an oil spill of some sort, but also beautiful and unexpected. Joseph mentioned that the apartment he shared with his partner had a gazebo outside “that bloomed with pink orange trumpet vines . . . flowers the color, I just now realize, of salmon roe.” I used this specific flower to give the design a more organic touch.
I attempted sideways typography to help anchor the layout and frame the collage. I liked the visual of a circle/circles since it could represent many different things relevant to the text: salmon eggs, a pregnant stomach, the Earth. We utilized vintage diagrams of pregnancy and the images of water to incorporate the environment into the design. I also enjoyed how the reflective light patterns kind of mirrored stretch marks from pregnancy.
For colors: I utilized a soft orange-pink color that the author mentions from the trumpet flowers and the roe/eggs. I also felt blues and greens helped convey natural elements, and a warm yellow gave it some life. Overall, I wanted the cover to feel optimistic as well more literary and conceptual.
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