I Am Home: Portraits of Immigrant Teenagers
Ericka McConnell (photography), Rachel Neumann (editor), Thi Bui (foreword)
60 full-page portraits of students at Oakland International High School, photographed by award-winning photographer Ericka McConnell, are accompanied by their own unique, diverse, & surprising stories of what makes them feel at home. Each of these young people is inspiring in their own right & together their stories will help us consider the issue of immigration with new mindfulness & compassion.
All profits from the publication of this book will be donated to Oakland Int'l HS.
Thi Bui was born in Việt Nam 3 months before the end of the American War, & came to the United States in 1978 as part of the “boat people” wave of refugees from Southeast Asia. Her debut graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do (2017), has been selected as UCLA’s Common Book for 2017, a National Book Critics Circle finalist in autobiography, an Eisner Award finalist in Reality Based Comics, & made several Best of 2017 book lists, including Bill Gates’s top five picks. Bui is also the Caldecott Honor-winning illustrator of A Different Pond, a picture book by the poet Bao Phi (Capstone, 2017). Her short comics can be found online at The Nib, Reveal News, PEN America, & BOOM California. She is currently researching & drawing a work of graphic nonfiction about how Asian Americans are impacted by incarceration & deportation, to be published by One World, Random House.
Bui taught high school in NYC & was a founding teacher of Oakland International High School, the first public high school in California for recent immigrants & English learners. Since 2015, she has been a faculty member of the MFA in Comics program at the California College of the Arts.
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