American cartoonist
Jen Sorensen (born September 28, 1974) is an American cartoonist and illustrator who authors a weekly comic strip that often focuses on current events from a liberal perspective. Her work appears on the websites Daily Kos, Splinter, The Nib, Politico, AlterNet, and Truthout; and has appeared in Ms. Magazine, The Progressive, and The Nation. It also appears in over 20 alternative newsweeklies throughout America. In 2014 she became the first woman to win the Herblock Prize, and in 2017 she was named a Pulitzer Finalist in Editorial Cartooning.
From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)
I’ve always been interested in politics, but when I first got out of college I just wanted to have fun and do non-political work. What happened was the Bush vs Gore election and the Supreme Court [decision]. That was the event that really shocked me into starting to do political cartoons. It was just so outrageous at the time. Then 9/11 and the Iraq War. I prefer doing a mix of straightforward political cartoons and more cultural cartoons about trends and facial hair and things like that. Now I feel silly doing a strip about beards. [laughs] Maybe things will calm down and I can go back to doing cartoons about facial hair. As time went on and politics became more and more dire, that’s what really sent me down that path. Also I started picking up more and more clients that are explicitly political, like dailkos and The Progressive Magazine and once in a while The Nation will run a cartoon. That pushed me in a more political direction as well.
The presidential primaries are not for the thinking person. All the nonstop chatter about the candidates' temperaments makes me wonder why I even bother to learn about things like, you know, issues...In this precarious time of war, global warming, a health care crisis, and economic woes, this is how we decide the leader of the most powerful nation on earth?