Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey Edel Rodriguez 9781474616720

From the iconic, award-winning artist and designer, a graphic memoir of leaving Cuba, becoming American, and fighting for freedom, here and there.

'Exhilarating, immensely powerful, gorgeous' PHILIPPE SANDS
'Belongs in the pantheon that MAUS built' PRINT MAGAZINE
'Shocking, brilliant, soul-shattering . . . this book is so good' CHIP KIDD

When Fidel Castro opened the Mariel harbour to let Cubans sail for America, Edel Rodriguez and his family took their chance. From the town of El Gabriel to the Mariel port to a rickety shrimping boat bound for Florida, they joined the 1980 boatlift, becoming 'worms', as Castro called the departing Cubans.

Years later, Edel Rodriguez has become one of the most prominent political artists of our age, hailed for his iconic work on the cover of Time and on jumbotrons around the world. In stunning visual detail, Worm tells his story - of a boyhood in Cold War Cuba, of a family's courage and displacement and of coming of age as an artist, activist, and American.

EDEL RODRIGUEZ was born in 1971 in Havana, Cuba. He received a B.F.A. in Painting from Pratt Institute in 1994 and an M.F.A. from Hunter College in 1998. He is the recipient of both a Gold and a Silver Medal for editorial illustration from the Society of Illustrators. His work has been featured on the covers of Time, the New Yorker and Der Spiegel; other clients include MTV, Pepsi, U.S. Postal Service, Nike, Rolling Stone, GQ, Playboy, Reader's Digest, National Geographic Traveler, the New York Times, New York Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Esquire, Conde Naste Traveler, the Washington Post and the Losa Angeles Times.
Edel's artwork is in the collections of numerous institutions, including the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., as well as in many private collections.