Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (Chast) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—November 26, 1954
• Raised—Brooklyn, New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.F.A., Rhode Island School of Design
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Ridgefield, Connecticut


Rosalind "Roz" Chast is an American cartoonist and a staff cartoonist for The New Yorker. She grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, the only child of an assistant principal and a high school teacher who subscribed to The New Yorker.

Education
She is a graduate of Midwood High School in Brooklyn and first attended Kirkland College (now Hamilton College), and then studied at the Rhode Island School of Design where she received a BFA in painting in 1977.

Career
Her earliest cartoons were published in Christopher Street and The Village Voice. In 1978 The New Yorker accepted one of her cartoons and has since published more than 800. She also publishes cartoons in Scientific American and the Harvard Business Review.

Chast's subjects often deal with domestic and family life. In a 2006 interview with comedian Steve Martin for the New Yorker Festival, Chast revealed that she enjoys drawing interior scenes—often involving lamps and accentuated wall paper—to serve as the backdrop for her comics. Her comics reflect a "conspiracy of inanimate objects," an expression she credits to her mother.

Her first New Yorker cartoon showed a small collection of "Little Things," strangely named, oddly shaped small objects such as "chent," "spak," and "tiv". Chast's drawing style shuns conventional craft in her figure drawing, perspective, shading, etc.; this approach is similar to that of several other female cartoonists, notably Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Lynda Barry. A significant part of the humor in Chast's cartoons appears in the background and the corners of the frames.

Her New Yorker cartoons began as small black-and-white panels, but increasingly she has been using color and her work now often appears over several pages. Her first cover for The New Yorker was on August 4, 1986, showing a lecturer in a white coat pointing to a family tree of ice cream.

Chast's subjects often deal with domestic and family life. In a 2006 interview with comedian Steve Martin for the New Yorker Festival, Chast revealed that she enjoys drawing interior scenes—often involving lamps and accentuated wall paper—to serve as the backdrop for her comics. Her comics reflect a "conspiracy of inanimate objects," an expression she credits to her mother.

She is represented by the Danese/Corey gallery in Chelsea, New York City. She lives in Ridgefield, Connecticut with her husband, humor writer Bill Franzen.

Books
In addition to her 2014 family memoir, Can We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Chast has written or illustrated more than a dozen books, including Unscientific Americans, Parallel Universes, Mondo Boxo, Proof of Life on Earth, The Four Elements, and The Party After You Left: Collected Cartoons 1995–2003 (Bloomsbury, 2004).

In 2006, Theories of Everything: Selected Collected and Health-Inspected Cartoons, 1978–2006 was published, collecting most of her cartoons from The New Yorker and other periodicals. One characteristic of her books is that the "author photo" is always a cartoon she draws (presumably) of herself. The title page is also hand-lettered by Chast, even including the Library of Congress cataloging information. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/25/2014.)

Awards/Honors
2013 - Inducted into American Academy of Arts and Sciences
       - Reuben Award for Best Gag Cartoon
2012 - New York City Literary Award for Humor
2004 - Art Festival Award, Museum of Cartoon and Comic Art

Honorary Doctorates: 2011, Dartmouth College; 2010, Art Institute of Boston; 1998, Pratt Institute. ("Awards/Honors" from the author's website.)