“Sea Saga” is featured on the cover of Tracy K. Smith’s “To Free the Captives”
I’m honored that my recent work, Sea Saga, is featured on the cover of Tracy K. Smith’s new book, To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul, published by Alfred A. Knopf on November 7, 2023.
Tracy K. Smith, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States writes:
“I’m overjoyed to share the book jacket of TO FREE THE CAPTIVES: A PLEA FOR THE AMERICAN SOUL, featuring the beautiful and enthralling indigo diptych Sea Saga by Melissa McGill .
This is a book about what it has long felt like to live with and within America’s official and unofficial institutions: universities, the military, Jim Crow, and especially the collective American imagination. It’s also an ode to the ingenious resourcefulness of Black Love, which insists, in the face of so many annihilating forces, upon its-and our-continuance.”