Wave-riding, anyone? This issue marks the second time we’ve featured Pawel Kuczynski’s art on a Plough Quarterly cover. This time, the ocean holds no threat of circling iPad fins. The pages of knowledge unfurl as beckoning waves at the feet of a young sailor … who’s not in school uniform. These are waves that roll in over the course of a lifetime, inviting us to navigate them.

Satirical artist and social critic Pawel Kuczynski was born in 1976 in Szczecin, Poland. His childhood was colored by dramatic resistance to the nation’s communist regime. After years of political turmoil, the first free Polish elections since the 1920s were held in 1991, when Kuczynski was fifteen. After secondary school, Kuczynski specialized in graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan and, when a friend challenged him to enter a cartoon competition in 2004, he became hooked on satire illustration. Today, his art is recognized worldwide and has received over one hundred and thirty awards.

In addition to art featured in this issue, don’t miss his acerbic, disturbingly accurate social commentary from summer 2017.