Let’s Face It: In Search of the Alluring Author Photo

By Lisa Kusel

I.   A few years before finding a smattering of success as a writer I enrolled in a poetry class being taught by a local legend, Molly Fisk. For one of the assignments Molly asked us to write an egocentric poem; one that could be as farfetched or fantastical as we wished. “Dream big,” she’d said.

I wrote a fanciful poem describing how beautiful I would look on the dust jacket of my first book. I imagined my (not-yet-written) novel being so esteemed that my publisher would hir...