When Oliver Munday set out to design the jacket art for Colson Whitehead’s new novel coming in September, Harlem Shuffle, he turned to a quote from the man himself: “I get to be funny again.” “I could feel the sigh of relief in his words,” Munday tells TIME. The designer behind the art for Whitehead’s two Pulitzer Prize-winning novels, The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, felt a similar sense of levity.