Lynda Barry

Lynda Barry was born Linda Jean Barry on January 2, 1956, in the United States. She is best known for her long-running weekly comic strip *Ernie Pook's Comeek*, which showcased her distinctive, raw, and emotionally resonant storytelling. Her first illustrated novel, *The Good Times are Killing Me* (1988), explored an interracial childhood friendship and was later adapted into a stage play. She followed this with the darker illustrated novel *Cruddy* (1999) and the inventive *One! Hundred! Demons!* (2002), a graphic novel she described as "autobifictionalography." Barry's 2008 work *What It Is* blended memoir, collage, and a creativity workbook, earning the 2009 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work. Her style is marked by a loose, expressive line and a deep empathy for childhood and outsider perspectives. She has collaborated with various editors and publishers over her career, which spans from the late 1970s to the present. Barry has received significant recognition, including the Wisconsin Visual Art Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013, induction into the Eisner Hall of Fame in 2016, and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019. She currently serves as an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her work was also featured in the 2020 exhibit *Women in Comics: Looking Forward, Looking Back* at the Society of Illustrators in New York City.