Roz Chast is known for turning everyday anxieties into sharply funny, unmistakably personal cartoons. She has been one of the most influential cartoonists of her generation, earning many honors including the Reuben Award from the National Cartoonists Society in 2015 as well as National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2024. 

Born in Brooklyn in 1954, Chast was the only child of public school teachers. Discovering Charles Addams’s work at the age of nine sparked a fascination with cartooning that never left her. After earning a BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 1977, Chast returned to New York and to her initial love of cartooning. Her work began appearing in the Village Voice and the National Lampoon, and in 1978, she sold her first cartoon to The New Yorker. Her cartoons and covers for The New Yorker have been published continuously since then. 

Her 2014 memoir, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, about caring for her aging parents, became a critical and commercial success, winning major awards and becoming the first graphic novel to be named a nonfiction finalist for the National Book Award. It also won the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, as well as many other awards