Worm by Edel Rodriguez

From America's illustrator in chief" ( Fast Company ), a stunning graphic
memoir of a childhood in Cuba, coming to America on the Mariel boatlift,
and a defense of democracy, here and there
Hailed for his iconic art on the cover of Time and on jumbotrons around the
world, Edel Rodriguez is among the most prominent political artists of our age.
Now for the first time, he draws his own life, revisiting his childhood in Cuba
and his family's passage on the infamous Mariel boatlift.
When Edel was nine, Fidel Castro announced his surprising decision to let
125,000 traitors of the revolution, or "worms," leave the country. The faltering
economy and Edel's family's vocal discomfort with government surveillance
had made their daily lives on a farm outside Havana precarious, and they
secretly planned to leave. But before that happened, a dozen soldiers
confiscated their home and property and imprisoned them in a detention
center near the port of Mariel, where theywere held with dissidents and
criminals before being marched to a flotilla that miraculously deposited them,
overnight, in Florida.
Through vivid, stirring art, Worm tells a story of a boyhood in the midst of the
Cold War, a family's displacement in exile, and their tenacious longing for
those they left behind. It also recounts the coming-of-age of an artist and
activist, who, witnessing American's turn from democracy to extremism,
struggles to differentiate his adoptive country from the dictatorship he fled.

Edel Rodriguez is a Cuban American artist who has exhibited internationally
with shows in New York, Los Angeles, Havana, Berlin, La Paz, Cape Town,
Prague, and London. A regular contributor to the New Yorker, the New York
Times, and Time magazine, he has created over two hundred magazine and
book covers and illustrated ten children's books, including Sonia Sotomayor:
A Judge Grows in the Bronx, and is the author of Sergio Jumps and Sergio
Saves the Game . Rodriguez's artwork is collected by various institutions,
including the Smithsonian Institution, and has received numerous awards from
the Art Directors Club and the Society of Illustrators. Worm is his first graphic
novel. He lives in New Jersey.

Henry Holt & Co
On Sale: Nov 7/23
7.5 x 10 • 304 pages
4/c panels t/o
9781250753977 • $39.99 • cl
Comics & Graphic Novels / NonFic / Biography &
Memoir