Comics

Welcome to the New World

Back in 2016, I created a graphic series for The New York Times, called Welcome to the New World, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

Together with my illustrator, Michael Sloan, I later expanded that series into a book. It tells the story of a family of Syrian refugees who arrived in the U.S. on Election Day 2016. They effectively landed in one country and woke up in another. The politics of the day -- like Trump's Muslim Ban -- have played out powerfully and personally for this family, effectively severing the family in half.

This a graphic narrative -- or true comic -- that uses a combination of art and reporting to tell a story. The book is almost entirely new from the original New York Times series. In the book, we tell the story from the point of view of the family's teenage son, Naji. It is an epic coming of age tale in Trump’s America.

Separation

This project began with a conversation I had with Michael Sloan, an illustrator I had collaborated with before. The subject was how to address one of the most divisive, most intractable issues in American society: namely, the question of who gets to live here.

That question underlay the rancorous political debate that had torn apart families and the electorate over the past twenty-five years. It helped flip the presidency in 2024. It led directly to the presence of ICE officers in cities across the country, to protests, violence and, as we had just seen in Minneapolis and Portland, to shootings and deaths.

Our answer was Separation, a serialized nonfiction feature about the experiences of Mateo, a young undocumented immigrant, and his family as they tried to secure a place in the U.S. at a time of unprecedented political pressure and threats to their personal safety.