Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Little Movements by Lauren Morrow, which will be published by Random House on September 9, 2025. You can pre-order your copy here.
Thirty-something Layla Smart was raised by her mother to dream medium. But all Layla’s ever wanted was a career in dance, which requires dreaming big. So when she receives an offer to be the choreographer-in-residence at Briar House in rural Vermont, she temporarily leaves behind Brooklyn, her job, her friends, and her husband to pursue it.
Layla has nine months to navigate a complex institution and teach a career-defining dance to a group of Black dancers in a very small, very white town. She has help from a handsome composer, a neurotic costume designer, a witty communications director, and the austere program director who can only compare Layla to Black choreographers. It’s an enormous feat, and that’s before Layla’s marriage buckles under the strain of distance, before Briar House’s problematic past comes to light, and before Layla finds out she’s pregnant.
Little Movements is a poignant and insightful story that explores issues of race, class, art, and ambition. It is a novel about self-discovery, the pressures placed on certain bodies, and never giving up on your dream.
Here is the cover, designed by Cassie Vu.
Lauren Morrow: One of the first things people wanted to know when I told them about my book–that it had sold, it was real, it was happening!–was what I imagined for the cover design. I was at a loss. After all these years, I’d never truly considered the cover, despite knowing how important it is. The cover is often the first encounter someone has with a book. Perhaps that was why I couldn’t think about it. My job, for so long, had been to focus on the words inside. Shifting my focus to the outside, the visual presentation of it all, felt overwhelming.
Eventually, of course, I had to think about the cover. I sent my editor a concept document that included many of the gorgeous covers I’ve admired in recent years along with some early ideas. I knew I liked clean text and bold colors. And I was certain I wanted a figure of some sort, at least in part. The book is largely about dance, after all.
Soon after sharing my thoughts, my editor sent back some early design concepts, and while I liked some of them, nothing felt quite right. I offered feedback and sent images of different dancers doing different things than what they’d been doing in the design I’d like the most of the few offered. More complex positions and energy. The designer incorporated those ideas in a way that was nearly exactly what I’d asked for, and yet still, something was amiss. Everything shared was beautiful, but none of the dancers felt quite right. The image needed to be complicated a bit. It needed texture, layering, something unexpected. My agent even found dancer wallpaper that offered a more abstract feel, which I liked quite a lot (I still may buy the wallpaper for my apartment; watch this space).
The next round offered four very different concepts, all of which were lovely, but the one that caught my attention–and that of everyone I showed–was the one without a figure. There is so much movement in the image, even the suggestion of a body wrapped in the gorgeous flowing fabric. It makes you look twice, think twice. It makes you wonder.
I love that there’s no visible figure on the cover. No projection of who we’re meant to imagine on the pages. There is a quality of falling, of isolation–crucial to the book. It’s fluid, and sexy, and full of life, all without a body.
Another reason I was drawn to this particular design is that it feels like a nod to so much beautiful dance imagery, most notably the fabric that swims across the stage in the “Wade in the Water” section of Alvin Ailey’s Revelations. Ailey and his work loom large in the book, and it felt really powerful to see this deepened, inverted nod to that work here. I don’t believe it was intentional on the part of the designer, but for me, it’s impossible not to see that imagery on the cover. I spent many years working for Ailey and still see the company–and inevitably Revelations–at least twice a year. When I first scrolled through the final round of options and landed on this one, the fabric floating down, I got a bit teary. That was when the decision was made, I suppose. It felt fated in a way.
For so long I’ve kept things close to the vest with this book. It’s my way with most things, and a debut novel is a vulnerable thing. A person cracked open. But now, I’m eager to share it. To show it. There is proof that it exists. That it’s a thing people will be able to have and hold. And she’s a beauty.
Cassie Vu: We knew that we wanted to represent movement in some way on this cover, so first we went down the path of having a dancer in a spotlight on the cover, and different versions of cropped, dancing bodies. Ultimately we decided against that, because even though the book is set in the dance world, the main character is a choreographer, not a dancer. The author liked the deep purples and pinks of the color palette I had been working in, so we used that and leaned into a more abstract approach. The final image is meant to evoke movement, dance, perhaps the shape of a body, a little bit of tension… but nothing too obvious!
