Dave Coverly's presentation will be a leisurely stroll through the history of his single panel cartoon, Speed Bump, with an emphasis on the age-old questions: where *do* ideas come from, anyway? What makes one worth drawing and another worth tossing? Why so many dog cartoons? How does a person do this sort of thing for over 30 years? Why would anyone be dumb enough to do this sort of thing for over 30 years? Oh, and he'll happily answer questions as long as they're not sartorial. This will be obvious when you meet him.
Dave Coverly, a native of Plainwell, Michigan, is the creator of the cartoon panel “Speed Bump”, which appears internationally in about 400 newspapers and websites, including the Washington Post, The Globe & Mail (Toronto), the Los Angeles Times, and the Detroit Free Press. His work was named “Best in Newspaper Panels” by the National Cartoonists Society in 1995, 2003, 2014 and 2021.
In 2009 the same organization gave him its highest honor, the prestigious Reuben Award, for “Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year”. Coverly’s cartoons have also appeared in The New Yorker, USA Today, The New York Times, Newsweek, Esquire, and have been a regular feature in Parade magazine. He is also the principle cartoonist for BarkBox and regularly donates cartoons to PETA and The Humane Society, as well as other charitable organizations that focus on dogs and cats. A “Speed Bump” line of greeting cards is published by Woodmansterne in the UK and by NobleWorks in the US. Sellers/RSVP also publishes a page-a-day calendar every year of his dog panels. There are numerous book collections of Coverly’s cartoons, most notably Dogs Are People, Too (Macmillan). He is also the author and/or illustrator of numerous children’s books, including Sue MacDonald Had a Book (with Jim Tobin), The Very Inappropriate Word (with JimTobin), and How to Care for Your Pet T-Rex (with Ken Baker). His chapter book series began with Night of the Living Worms: The Misadventures of Speed Bump & Slingshot, and continued with Night of the Living Shadows, and Night of the Living Zombie Bugs. Coverly earned his BS with a double major in Imaginative Writing and Philosophy at Eastern Michigan University in 1987 and received his MA in Creative Writing from Indiana University in 1993. In 2011, he was asked to give the commencement address at EMU, where he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts. He and his wife, Chris, live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and have two adult daughters, Alayna and Simone. He can be contacted through his website: www.speedbump.com.
