Swayback Books is a project from Afton and Tessa Love.


We’re sisters whose respective careers and ongoing love of kids’ books naturally brought us here: founding our own indie publishing house to create more of the kinds of picture books we want to see in the world.

Afton Love is an artist living in New Mexico. Rooted in material process and the natural world, her delicately rendered drawings of desert rock formations are exhibited and collected internationally. Children’s books and child psychology have long influenced her thinking and practice. Having studied childhood development and art education alongside fine and sculptural art, she taught and developed art curricula for preschoolers before becoming a full-time artist.


Tessa Love is a writer living in Berlin. She began as a poet and has spent her career working as a journalist, essayist, editor, and publisher. She previously co-founded and published Nobody, an indie magazine that made space for the experimentation and creativity often sidelined in the worlds of media and publishing. Alongside her literary work, she has also spent the past fifteen years as a cultural researcher focused on youth culture and the creative worlds young people build.