Bio
"Salley" is Kate Salley Palmer's maiden name, so you can just call her Kate.
She started doing political cartoons for The Greenville News in 1975.
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.
In 1984, she left The Greenville News. 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 children's picture books. 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, after “A Gracious Plenty” went out of print at Simon & Schuster, she and her husband, Jim, regained all the rights along with the films; formed their own publishing company, Warbranch Press, Inc.; and republished the book in softcover.
Since then, Kate has produced seven more titles for Warbranch Press, among them: “The Pink House,” The Little Chairs,” Palmetto: Symbol of Courage,” “Francis Marion and the Legend of the Swamp Fox,” and “Almost Invisible: Black Patriots of the American Revolution.”
In 2006, The Clemson University Digital Press published her memoir/cartoon retrospective, “Growing Up Cartoonist in the Baby Boom South,” a leisurely ramble through Kate’s growing-up years in Orangeburg, SC, combined with a bit of modern political history--and page after page of scary old political cartoons that could easily run today.
In 2016, Kate published a Campaign Coloring Book, featuring all the presidential candidates that year. In 2018, she did another one for the presidential election of 2020.
in 2019, The University of South Carolina Press published Kate's story of a Native American legend, "The Lady of Cofitachequi." This book is illustrated by Kate's son, James, a graphic artist in Atlanta.
