Roz Chast

Rosalind "Roz" Chast (born November 26, 1954) 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. 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.
In recognition of her work, Comics Alliance listed Chast as one of twelve women cartoonists deserving of lifetime achievement recognition.

Chast is a graduate of Midwood High School in Brooklyn. Her parents were children of the Depression, and she has spoken about their extreme frugality. She first attended Kirkland College (which later merged with Hamilton College) and then studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and received a BFA in painting in 1977. She also holds honorary doctorates from Pratt Institute and Dartmouth College, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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.

She 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 of, presumably, herself. The title page, including the Library of Congress cataloging information, is also hand-lettered by Chast.

Her book Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? is a graphic memoir, combining cartoons, text, and photographs to tell the story of an only child helping her elderly parents navigate the end of their lives.

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. They have two children.

• 2014 Kirkus Prize winner for Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
• 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award (Autobiography) winner for Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
• 2015 Reuben Award, Cartoonist of the Year National Cartoonists Society
• 2015 Heinz Award for the Arts and Humanities

• "National Book Critics Circle Announces Finalists for Publishing Year 2014". National Book Critics Circle. January 19, 2015. Retrieved January 29, 2015. 
• Alexandra Alter (March 12, 2015). "'Lila' Honored as Top Fiction by National Book Critics Circle". New York Times. Retrieved March 12, 2015. 
• "The Heinz Awards: Roz Chast". The Heinz Awards. Retrieved August 24, 2016.