“Among our most gifted lifters of political veils and pretenses” — New York Times
Photo credit: Lisa Nipp for the National Press Foundation
Jen Sorensen’s comics and illustrations have appeared in the The Nation, NPR.org, Ms. Magazine, The Progressive, Politico, Daily Kos, Fusion, The Nib, AlterNet, Truthout, MAD, Nickelodeon, The Los Angeles Times, The Austin Chronicle, The Village Voice, In These Times, The Book of Jezebel, and dozens of other publications around the country. She has created commissioned long-form comics for the ACLU, NPR, Kaiser Health News, The Oregonian, and other clients.
Her work has won many accolades. She received the Berryman Award for Editorial Cartooning from the National Press Foundation in 2023, and was a Pulitzer Finalist in Editorial Cartooning in 2017. In 2014, she was awarded the Herblock Prize, an award endowed by the legendary Washington Post cartoonist Herb Block. In 2013, she was the recipient of a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and she also won the National Cartoonists Society Award for Best Editorial Cartoons. In 2015, Sorensen was given an Inkpot Award for career achievement in comic arts from the San Diego Comic-Con International.
Additionally, in 2012 she was named the Herblock Prize Finalist; received an Aronson Journalism Award from Hunter College in NYC in 2010; and in 2000 she won a Xeric grant to publish her first collection of strips. She has also won numerous awards from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, including First Place in the Cartoon category in 2014.
Sorensen has given presentations at the National Archives, the Ohio State University Library Festival of Cartoon Art, Netroots Nation, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Center for American Progress. In 2022, she served as a judge for the European Cartoon Award, part of the European Press Prize, and spoke at the award ceremony in Maastricht, Netherlands. In 2015, Sorensen was invited to represent the US as a juror at the Aydin Doğan International Cartoon Competition in Turkey. She also judged the New York Times Learning Network’s student editorial cartoon contest in 2015 and 2016.
Jen serves on the National Advisory Council of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State University. She was President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists in 2021.
Jen grew up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and went on to attend the University of Virginia, where she studied cultural anthropology and drew cartoons for college publications. She started her weekly strip in 1998, which quickly became political as the 2000 election and 9/11 dominated the national conversation.
Additional fun facts: Jen was once clue “12 down” in the Time Out New York crossword puzzle and her work made cameos on the “Queer as Folk” television series.
University of Virginia Magazine video interview, 2009
