The New Yorker Cartoonist & Author

Monday, November 21, 2011, 7:30pm

Since she sold her first cartoon to The New Yorker in 1978, Roz Chast has established herself as one of our greatest artistic chroniclers of the anxieties, superstitions, furies, insecurities, and surreal imaginings of modern life.

Since then, nine collections have been published of Chast's work, most recently, Theories of Everything, a twenty-five year retrospective. Roz Chast is known for her cast of recurring characters - generally hapless but relatively cheerful "everyfolk." In her cartoons, she addresses the universal topics of guilt, anxiety, aging, families, friends, money, real estate, and as she would say, "much, much more!"  The editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, has called her "the magazine's only certifiable genius." She recently collaborated with Steve Martin on the children's book The Alphabet from A to Y with Bonus Letter Z! published by Random House.  Her new book, Too Busy Marco,will be published by Simon & Schuster and released in the fall of 2010.

Chast grew up in Brooklyn.  She received a BFA in 1977 from Rhode Island School of Design with studies in graphic design and painting, but returned to the cartooning which she had begun in high school.  Less than two years out of college, she was added to the forty or so artists under contract to The New Yorker which has continually published her work for 25 years, from black and white cartoons to color spreads, back pages and covers. In addition she has provided cartoons and editorial illustrations for almost fifty magazines and journals from Mother Jones to Town & Country. She has illustrated several children's books and contributed to many humor collections, lectured widely and received several prestigious awards including honorary degrees from Pratt Institute and the Art Institute of Boston.  Roz Chast lives in Connecticut with her family and several parrots.

To learn more, visit

http://www.rozchast.com

Check out Roz Chast Revealed from Simon & Schuster.

Read more Questions for Roz Chast from Slate.com.