The Centre for Ethnography will be hosting a reading and conversation with the author of the graphic novel This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America.
This Country is a funny, personal and politically informed, story about the author and his wife moving from San Francisco to rural Idaho during the Trump years. The narrative moves beyond simple stereotypes and reveals both unlikely friendships, shifting understandings of home and land, as well as sometimes awkward and difficult relations.
Speakers
Navied Mahdavian has been a contributing cartoonist to The New Yorker since 2018, where his cartoons and comics appear regularly. He is the author of the graphic memoir, This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America (2023). His work has also been featured in the LA Times, Reader's Digest, Wired, Alta Online, and in the cartoon collections, The Rejection Collection (2022) and Send Help! (2021). He has received fellowships from MacDowell, where he was a Hershey’s Family Foundation Fellow, and La Napoule Art Foundation. Before becoming a cartoonist, he taught the 5th grade where he learned most of his jokes.