How to Enter
1: Complete the appropriate submissions form:
Books and Journals Entry Form
Jackets and Covers Entry Form
2: Submit payment for your entries:
3: Ship ONE copy of each of your entries to the AUPresses Central Office:
Association of University Presses
Attention: Kate Kolendo
Book, Jacket, and Journal Show
1412 Broadway, Suite 2135
New York, NY 10018
Deadline for Entries: Monday, January 12, 2026
ENTRIES MUST BE RECEIVED BY THE ENTRY DEADLINE TO BE CONSIDERED FOR THE SHOW. NO EXCEPTIONS. NO EXTENSIONS.
Please mail entries as soon as possible to avoid a deluge of entries arriving close to, or after, the deadline.
View the call for entries PDF.
Entry Fees
$45.00 per book/journal
$35.00 per jacket/cover
Fees are due upon submission.
Categories
BOOKS AND JOURNALS
Scholarly typographic, Scholarly illustrated, Trade typographic, Trade illustrated, Poetry & literature, Journals, and Reference
JACKETS AND COVERS
Book Jacket design, Book cover design, and Journal cover design
EXPLANATION OF CATEGORIES
Books can be entered for competition in the AUPresses Book, Jacket, and Journal Show in the following categories: Scholarly typographic, Scholarly illustrated, Trade typographic, Trade illustrated, Poetry and literature, and Reference. Books may also be submitted for their jacket or cover design. Journals are judged on their overall design or on their covers.
SCHOLARLY BOOKS are intended for a specialized audience, oftentimes for academic instructors to use as texts in college courses. They are not widely distributed to sell in bookstores and are most often available from online retailers and directly from the publisher. They are reviewed in academic journals and advertised directly to their core audience. The text structure is typically more complex, requiring a design that helps the reader navigate the variety of text elements and scholarly apparatus, including footnotes, endnotes, and appendices. These books are given a specialist or short discount, which usually indicates that they will not be stocked in brick and mortar retailers; and online retailers may sell to customers at full price or less than their usual discount.
SCHOLARLY TYPOGRAPHIC: A book with no or comparatively few illustrations that are clearly subordinate to the text.
SCHOLARLY ILLUSTRATED: A book in which the visual elements (such as photography, art, or graphic design) are the focus and the text is subordinate.
TRADE BOOKS are intended for a general audience and to be widely distributed. The design is typically open and accessible and the text features few, if any, notes, appendices, and bibliographies. They are available for sale in bookstores and are reviewed and advertised in general interest and national newspapers, magazines, websites, and other media. These books are given a trade discount by publishers so that they may be stocked by brick and mortar retailers, and online retailers may sell them to customers at a discounted price.
TRADE TYPOGRAPHIC: A book with no or comparatively few illustrations that are clearly subordinate to the text.
TRADE ILLUSTRATED: A book in which the visual elements (such as photography, art, or graphic design) are the focus and the text is subordinate.
POETRY AND LITERATURE Poetry books often require line-for-line formatting and have unique spacing requirements, while works of literature typically have few formatting needs.
REFERENCE books may be primarily intended for a trade or a scholarly audience, depending on the subject. Because they will not be read from beginning to end, reference books must organize information in a way that allows for quick location of specific entries in the text, which should be easy to read. The text may be paired with illustrations or other visuals.
JOURNALS are intended to be available to readers in libraries and other reference collections for many years, so design for both interiors and covers must be timeless. Balancing the need for fresh design against the importance of honoring the journal’s brand (which might be decades in the making) is also an important consideration. A note on the cover design: it must work on its own and as part of a series. The spine design is particularly important, since journals typically sit together on a shelf.
Eligibility
This competition is open to members of AUPresses only. Presses may submit any number of books, jackets, and covers published in the current calendar year, 2025, and journals published at least twice during 2025. Books may have been manufactured anywhere in the world, but imports or copublications from another publisher are not eligible.
The Jurors
BOOKS AND JOURNALS
Kelley Galbreath
Kelley Galbreath is a West Virginia-based designer and educator. She began her career at Viking Children’s Books, where she developed a love for layout and typography. After receiving her MFA in Graphic Design from MICA, she worked at Design Army in D.C., designing a little of everything. Since 2014, Galbreath has headed up her own studio primarily focusing on book design. She creates covers and interiors in a wide range of genres for clients including Chronicle Books, Quarto, Timber Press, University of Virginia Press, and Johns Hopkins University Press. She also teaches graphic design history at West Virginia University. Her work has been recognized by the AIGA’s 50 Books/50 Covers, Communication Arts, Print, the One Show, PaperSpecs, and the ADDYs. When not designing, you can find Galbreath hiking, gardening, or quilting.
Silas Munro
Silas Munro is a designer, artist, writer, researcher, curator, surfer and descendant of the Banyole people of Eastern Uganda. He is the founder of the design studio Polymode based in Los Angeles and Raleigh that works with clients across cultural spheres. Commissions and collaborations include: The New York Times Magazine, MIT Press, Nike, Airbnb, the Brooklyn Museum, Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Art Institute of Chicago, Dia Art Foundation, and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Munro is the curator and author of Strikethrough: Typographic Messages of Protest at Letterform Archive in 2022-2023 and the co-curator of Reverberations: Lineages in Design History at the Ford Foundation Gallery in 2025. He was a contributor to W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America and co-authored the first BIPOC-centered design history course, Black Design in America: African Americans and the African Diaspora in Graphic Design 19th-21st Century. His work was recently exhibited at the Joseloff Gallery at the University of Hartford, the McCoy Gallery at Merrimack College, the Raizes Gallery at Lesley University, the LA Design Festival, and the Scottsdale Museum of Art, as well as in the group show Data Consciousness: Reframing Blackness in Contemporary Print at Print Center New York, curated by Tiffany E. Barber. Munro is Founding Faculty, Chair Emeritus for the MFA Program in Graphic Design at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
JACKETS AND COVERS
Mary Ann Smith
Mary Ann Smith came to New York City to attend Parsons School of Design and made it her home. After earning a BFA degree, Smith began illustrating and designing professionally. Smith has illustrated for magazines, newspapers, the web and book publishers. She also designs book covers for major and independent publishers. This includes trade, hardcover, print, e-books, fiction and non-fiction titles. Her clients include Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, St Martin’s Press, Harlequin, Columbia University Press, Ohio State University Press, She Writes Press, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
Rush Jackson
Rush Jackson is a designer, artist, and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. They are the founder of Rush Jackson Studio, an independent graphic and type design studio embracing design, technology, language, and culture as interconnected sites of discovery and play. Jackson’s studio prioritizes typeface design and development, and offers design and creative direction services to a diverse range of constituents such as cultural institutions, arts organizations, publishers, artists, curators, and other cultural producers.
Notable projects include The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion (Aperture, 2019, with Mark Owens), In the Black Fantastic (Thames & Hudson, 2022), Shikeith: Notes towards Becoming a Spill (Aperture, 2022), Arielle Bobb-Willis: Keep the Kid Alive (Aperture, 2024), and Prospect Park: Photographs of a Brooklyn Oasis, 1980 to 2025 (Prestel, 2025). Jackson’s work in publication design has been recognized in AIGA’s 50 Books 50 Covers 2022 competition as a “50 Books” winner.
Jackson’s work has been featured in Port, It’s Nice That, AIGA’sEye on Design, form, The Brooklyn Rail, and Philly Artblog. Jackson has been invited to speak with audiences at Central Saint Martins, Poster House Museum, Google Design Talks, Maryland Institute College of Art, and Aperture’s PhotoBook Club.
About the Book, Jacket, and Journal Show
The Association of University Presses Book, Jacket, and Journal Show honors excellence in design produced by its member presses. The show recognizes meritorious achievement in the design, production, and manufacture of books, jackets, covers, journals, and digital publications by members of the university press community. 2026 marks the 61st anniversary of this book show.
What you may notice first about the publications by AUPresses members is the wide variety of subjects, forms, and approaches to disseminating scholarship. This variety reflects the diversity of the members themselves. Some members are among the very largest scholarly publishers in the world while other presses are offices with small staffs and limited resources. It also reflects the variety of new forms and formats available to publishers including digital and print-on-demand technologies in addition to offset printing. The budgets for the publications themselves reflect the market needs of the individual project, the press’s resources at hand, and decisions a press makes about physical aspects of the publication. What unites these books, however, is something you cannot see. It is the fact that these publications have been subject to the rigorous standards of peer review.
The design and production aspects of these publications are also integral to the very mission of the Association. Excellent design contributes to a book or journal’s reception and its impact in the larger world.
In addition to recognizing excellent work, the AUPresses Book, Jacket, and Journal Show provides an evaluation of members’ work and serves as a focus of discussion and a source of ideas for intelligent, creative, and resourceful bookmaking. The 2026 show will include books published by AUPresses members in 2025 and jackets and covers of books published that year. Books may have been manufactured anywhere in the world, but imports, and copublications designed and produced by a with a foreign publisher, are not eligible.
Through the show, and its acclaimed annual catalog, the Association seeks to expand the conversation about the essential importance of good design in scholarly publishing.
Special thanks to the 2025-2026 Book, Jacket, and Journal Show Committee
Alison Cobra, University of Calgary Press, Co-Chair
Corey Parson, University of North Georgia Press, Co-Chair
Shiraz Abdullahi Gallab, University of Michigan Press
Elliott Beard, Stanford University Press
Ashley Bernicky, University of Toronto Press
Felicia Cedillos, University of New Mexico Press
Jennifer Conn, University of Wisconsin Press
Alissa Faden, Vanderbilt University Press
Emily Hills, Virginia Tech Publishing & Press
Ceclia Sorochin, University of Virginia Press
Michelle van der Merwe, University of British Columbia Press
Stephanie Williams, Wayne State University Press, Board Liaison
Kate Kolendo, Community Development and Communications Manager, AUPresses
