Kate Palmer
Kate Salley Palmer is a native of South Carolina who has never lived anywhere else. Born in Orangeburg (about halfway between Columbia and Charleston), she moved to Clemson, South Carolina after graduating from the University of South Carolina. If you are thinking she should get out more, you're probably right. "Salley" is Kate Palmer's maiden name, so you can just call her Kate. She started doing political cartoons for The Greenville News in 1975. In 1978, the newspaper made the position full-time--the first newspaper in South Carolina to do so. In 1976, Kate joined the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists and attended her first AAEC convention. She and Etta Hulme, of The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, were the only two women cartoonists in attendance that year. Kate's husband, Jim, was the first male member of the then-called "Ladies Auxillary". In 1980, the (now renamed) Field Newspaper Syndicate began distributing Kate's cartoons nationwide. In 1981, she received the Freedoms Foundation's George Washington medal for editorial cartooning. She is rather defensive about never having won another award, so don't pick on her about it. In 1984, she left The Greenville News for health reasons (the newspaper got sick of her), and in 1985, her syndicate editor was fired. She then turned to self-syndication, which was a big mistake. She has no head for business. Kate Palmer then began to write and illustrate picture books, which people assumed were for children. She illustrated “How Many feet in the Bed?” by Diane Hamm for Simon & Schuster in 1990, then wrote and illustrated “A Gracious Plenty” for Simon & Schuster that same year. Throughout the ‘90s, Kate illustrated more than twenty books for other publishers. In 1998, she and Jim formed their own publishing company, Warbranch Press, Inc. Kate has since produced five titles for Warbranch Press. The Clemson University Digital Press is publishing her memoir/cartoon retrospective, “Growing Up Cartoonist in the Baby Boom South,” which, it turns out, is less a leisurely ramble through modern political history than a scary set of cartoons that could easily run today. “Growing Up Cartoonist in the Baby Boom South” should be out in the late spring of 2006. Kate Palmer still does political cartoons, because she can't help it.
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