'Dear Sister' Poetry Anthology Design
English PEN is one of the world’s oldest human rights organisations and Off the Shelf took part in its 100th anniversary celebration in 2021.
For the Dear Sister project, its participants wrote letters to ‘sisters’— inspirational women in their lives — in response to the workshop’s facilitator, Somali Italian writer and performer Ubah Cristina Ali Farah. Sheffield writers Debjani Chatterjee, Helen Mort, and Warda Yassin contributed creative responses to “sisterhood”. At Off the Shelf 2021, women involved in the project performed spoken word.
When it came to the design of the anthology, the brief was fairly open. I wanted to create a design that was simple and didn’t detract from the powerful words within it, keeping it minimal in black and cream. I created a cover illustration using negative space to combine women and writing into one simple image. Key subjects within the poems were also illustrated as simple line drawings. The design was turned into a digital book for the Off The Shelf Festival which can be viewed in full here: https://offtheshelf.org.uk
