Tom Toro

Tom Toro is a New Yorker cartoonist and author/illustrator. His cartoons have been popular features of The New Yorker for over a decade. His drawings have also appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review, Wired, Playboy, and elsewhere. His books include How to Potty Train Your Porcupine (Little, Brown), A User's Guide to Democracy (Celadon), Tiny Hands (Dock Street Press), and I'm Terrified of Bath Time and Back to School, Backpack! in collaboration with Simon Rich (Little, Brown). Tom was a finalist for the 2019 Reuben Award for gag cartoonist of the year. He is the current chair of the Northwest Chapter of the National Cartoonist Society. Through his speakers bureau, Tom lectures internationally about cartoon art, including at Columbia University and the Day of Knowledge in Mexico City. His literary fiction has been short-listed for the Disquiet International Literary Prize, and he contributed a dozen essays to The New Yorker Encyclopedia of Cartoons. Tom has been awarded writing residencies at the Orchard Project Episodic Lab in screenwriting and the Berkeley Repertory Theater Ground Floor in playwrighting. He attended NYU Graduate Film School, where he co-created films that played at Cannes, Sundance and Tribeca. He graduated cum laude from Yale, where he received the Betts Prize for his writing, while also drawing and editing cartoons for the Yale Herald. Tom has been profiled by NPR, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Huffington Post. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife, kid, and cat.