Thi Bui
“To understand how my father became the way he was, I had to learn what happened to him as a little boy. It took a long time to learn the right questions to ask.”
Thi Bui is a Vietnamese-born American cartoonist and graphic novelist who came to the US in 1978 as part of the “boat people” wave of refugees at the end of the Vietnam War. Her best-selling debut 2017 memoir, The Best We Could Do, follows Thi Bui’s parents’ life before and during the Vietnam War, their escape during the war, and their migration to the US as refugees. It won the American Book Award and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist in autobiography and the Eisner Award for reality-based comics. It was also selected as a Big Read title by the National Endowment for the Arts, and has been featured as a Community Read by multiple colleges, universities, and communities, including UCLA, the city of Seattle, and San Francisco public libraries.
Thi has been an illustrator on many book, including A Different Pond, written by poet Bao Phi, and Finding Papa, by Angela Pham Krans. Along with her son, Hien, Thi co-illustrated a children’s book, Chicken of the Sea, alongside Viet Thanh Nguyen and his son, Ellison.
She is currently working on a work of graphic nonfiction about immigrant detention and deportation, which will come out through One World, Random House.
