Worm: A Conversation with Edel Rodriguez and Riva Hocherman

Join award-winning artist Edel Rodriguez in conversation with executive editor at Henry Holt and Metropolitan Books Riva Hocherman as they discuss Edel’s recently released and first ever graphic novel, Worm.

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 they were 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. Confronting questions of patriotism and the liminal nature of belonging, Edel Rodriguez ultimately celebrates the immigrants, maligned and overlooked, who guard and invigorate American freedom.

$15 general, $10 members, $7 seniors/students

About the artist

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 several children’s books, including Sonia Sotomayor: A Judge Grows in the Bronx, and is the author of Sergio Makes a Splash! 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.

Photograph by Deborah Feingold.

Riva Hocherman is executive editor at Henry Holt and Metropolitan Books, where she publishes non-fiction and graphic novels with strong points of view in the areas of politics and history, international reportage, and cultural criticism. She has worked with Robin D.G. Kelley, Rashid Khalidi, Anna Politkovskaya, Nathan Thrall, Becca Rothfeld, Michael Frayn, and Astra Taylor, among many others. Her line of graphic novels include books by Joe Sacco, Riad Sattouf, Edel Rodriguez, and Howard Zinn. She has lived in London and Jerusalem and currently resides in New York City.

Image courtesy of Riva Hocherman.