Mel Odom (born September 2, 1950) is an American artist who has created book covers for numerous novels, including a number of paperback editions of the novels of Patrick White, the Australian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and several books by fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay such as The Fionavar Tapestry trilogy, Tigana, A Song for Arbonne, and The Lions of Al-Rassan.
[citation needed] Odom was born in Richmond, Virginia, USA, and grew up in Ahoskie, North Carolina, where his parents encouraged his interests in drawing and in dolls.
He majored in fashion illustration at Virginia Commonwealth University and then attended Leeds Polytechnic Institute of Art and Design in England for graduate work before moving to New York City in 1975.
In 1979 he provided the cover art for Penguin's paperback edition of Edmund White's novel Nocturnes for the King of Naples.
[citation needed] Edmund White wrote in his Introduction to Dreamer: "Mel Odom's work represents an original synthesis of...two moments in the history of taste: a recuperation of art-nouveau perversities of the past but in a shiny, shadowless, innocently hedonistic space....In Mel Odom's world the perverse has become at last a candid pleasure...a vision of utopia."