Lynda Barry

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Linda Jean Barry (born January 2, 1956), known professionally as Lynda Barry, is an American cartoonist. Barry is best known for her weekly comic strip ''Ernie Pook's Comeek''. She garnered attention with her 1988 illustrated novel ''The Good Times are Killing Me'', about an interracial friendship between two young girls, which was adapted into a play. Her second illustrated novel, ''Cruddy'', first appeared in 1999. Three years later she published ''One! Hundred! Demons!'', a graphic novel she terms "autobifictionalography". ''What It Is'' (2008) is a graphic novel that is part memoir, part collage and part workbook, in which Barry instructs her readers in methods to open up their own creativity; it won the comics industry's 2009 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work.

In recognition of her contributions to the comic art form, ComicsAlliance listed Barry as one of twelve women cartoonists deserving of lifetime achievement recognition, and she received the Wisconsin Visual Art Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. In July 2016, she was inducted into the Eisner Hall of Fame. Barry was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship as part of the Class of 2019. She is currently an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

In 2020, her work was included in the exhibit ''Women in Comics: Looking Forward, Looking Back'' at the Society of Illustrators in New York City.