CARTOONIST PROFILE

Bio

Clay Jones is a self-syndicated political cartoonist whose work is distributed to newspapers and news sites across the United States and around the world. He also draws a weekly cartoon for CNN Opinion’s weekly newsletter, Provoke/Persuade. Clay was represented by Creators Syndicate (2000-13) until he left to start his own syndicate. His career began in 1990 at The Panolian, a weekly newspaper in Batesville, Mississippi. Clay also worked for the Daily Leader in Brookhaven, Mississippi, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, and The Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He previously worked as a freelance cartoonist for The Daily Dot, The Seattle Times and The Costa Rica Star.

Clay won the Robert F. Kennedy Award and the Sigma Delta Chi from the Society of Professional Journalists in 2022. He also won “Best Cartoon” in the National Newspaper Association’s Better Newspaper Contest in 2018. He’s also won state awards in Mississippi, New York, Hawaii, and Virginia. Additionally, he was the finalist for the Herblock Award (2019) a finalist for the National Headliner Award in 2020, and rejected a weird “free speech” award from the government of Iran.

A collection of his work is archived at the Mattie Sink Memorial Library at Mississippi State University. In 2019, he published a book with Mr. Media publishing on the Donald Trump administration titled “Tales from the Trumpster Fire.” An early collection of his cartoons, titled “Knee-Deep in Mississippi,” was distributed by Pelican Publishing (1997). And his work was displayed in an exhibit at the Jewish Museum Berlin (2017).

His daily cartoons are featured in about 50 newspapers and have been reprinted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Dallas Morning News, the Winnipeg Free Press, the Ottawa Citizen, the Daily Beast, BuzzFeed, Newsweek and Time Magazine. They’ve been seen on CNN, MSNBC and CSPAN.

Clay plays and writes 90s-style alt-rock on guitar. He released the album “No Thanks To Hancock” with the band Corporate T-Shirt in 2009.

He lives somewhere in the Washington, D.C. suburbs of Northern Virginia.