Dana Mashoian Walrath's "The Book of Genocides" Confronts Ten Atrocities Through Graphic Non-Fiction

Key facts

• "The Book of Genocides" (2026) is a graphic non-fiction work by Dana Mashoian Walrath.
• The book opens with Walrath's grandmother hiding in an urn while Ottoman Turkish soldiers publicly dismember her great-grandfather, drawn in a scratchy digital style.
• It covers ten genocides: First Peoples of the Americas, Black Americans, Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Peoples, Armenians, Jews in the Holocaust, Palestinians, Cambodians, Tutsi, Bosnians, and Rohingya.
• Each chapter starts with a patterned red page, then an illustrated history, followed by full-body pencil drawings of human victims and animals paired with blackout poems.
• Walrath writes in the introduction: "I know the anger, fear, and violence that makes people lose their ground and meet violence with violence, but our dreams can be different."
• The book centers on the contested legal term "genocide," which it says is gatekept and weaponized by nation-states, human rights groups, and media.
• In 2024, New York Times editors instructed staff to avoid using "genocide," "ethnic cleansing," and "occupied territory" when covering Gaza.
• Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who lost 49 family members, coined "genocide" in 1944 but refused to support the 1951 United Nations petition "We Charge Genocide," which defined violence against Black Americans as genocide.