
Thi Bui, NOWHERELAND, 2018. Pen illustration, colored in Procreate.
Thi Bui, Reliable Laundromat, 2024. Pen and ink on paper, digital color in Procreate.
Thi Bui, 1997, 2024. Digital collage and drawing in Procreate.
NOWHERELAND
Thi Bui is a cartoonist, writer, educator, organizer, interdisciplinary artist and work in progress, born in Viet Nam, grown in California and New York, and currently maturing in New Orleans.
Artist BioA hardcover, two-color book of approximately 300 pages, NOWHERELAND will be a heart-wrenchingly gorgeous book, filled with hand-drawn illustrations and graphic narratives that employ elements of comic arts: panels, gutters, captions, speech balloons, etc. A well-drawn and well-written comic, it will be the perfect Trojan horse to get readers to engage with a subject they might not otherwise seek out. Reading a graphic novel is easy, even pleasurable, with emotional arcs, character arcs, and travel to distant places and into intimate spaces. Readers will connect emotionally with individuals impacted by these systems, through their narration and my drawings that reconstruct their memories visually. Through explainers drawn as comics, readers will also get a primer on the history of complex laws and systems that set the conditions today for our country’s massive system of immigrant detention, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which was only created in the aftermath of 9/11 and is absolutely not necessary for the processing of passports or citizenship. Readers will see Asian American, Latinx, and African American history intertwined in a new way that sheds light on the structural forces behind contemporary problems like tension and racial resentment between these ethnic groups, which often flare up at important moments of racial reckoning with white supremacy. No matter what their ethnic background is, a reader will learn something from this book and come away with new tools for empathy, understanding, and, hopefully, change-making.

Thi Bui
New Orleans, Louisiana
Thi Bui is a cartoonist, writer, educator, organizer, and interdisciplinary artist currently based in New Orleans. She advocates for immigrants and refugees and seeks to tell more complex stories of America and the world, to build cross cultural understanding and solidarity between movements for justice. She has won an American Book Award and a Caldecott Honor, and her graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do, is required reading at high schools, colleges, and universities across the country. Thi taught high school in New York City and was a founding teacher of Oakland International High School, the first public high school in California for recent immigrants and English learners. She is a faculty member of the MFA in Comics program at the California College of the Arts since 2015.