P.O. Box 39
Wilberforce, OH 45384

humerusjkb@aol.com

Jennifer Berman has been quietly stirring up trouble since she could hold a pencil. After being a student and political cartoonist at Antioch College in the early 1980s, Berman’s cartoons surfaced on Telegraph Avenue, in Berkeley, CA, where she was a street vendor, and it was there that Humerus Cartoons Postcards were born. Not wanting to be spoiled by the glamorous life of a street vendor for too long, she quickly moved the cartoon operation inland and indoors to her hometown of Chicago. For two years she was a graphic designer for Flying Fish Records, and after that, she decided it was time to take the plunge and enter the exhilirating and terrifying world of self-employment.

At this point, nearly a million of Jennifer's postcards are tacked up on office doors and taped onto refrigerators across the country and overseas. Her jibes at relationships, the male/female dynamic, politics and animals seem to strike a deep chord in more psyches than just her own. "Adult Children of Normal Parents" is probably her best-known cartoon, with "Thought Frequency as Pie Chart" and "Cross Cultural Relationships" tying for close seconds.

Jennifer's first book, Why Dogs Are Better than Men, came out in 1994 and was published by Pocket/Simon and Schuster. It was re-released Spring 2001 by Andrews McMeel. Adult Children of Normal Parents, a collection of cartoons about relationships, was released the following year and is currently "between publishers". 1996 saw the release of Why Dogs are Better Than Republicans, and Berman singlehandedly takes credit for President Clinton's sound trouncing of Bob Dole that year, and blames Dubya’s slim "victory" on the fact that her book on Republicans is no longer in print.

At some point during the 90s, Berman started self-syndicating her weekly cartoon panel, Berman. It appears in numerous alternative newsweeklies, magazines and newspapers around the country. Berman's cartoons have appeard in the Chicago Reader, Funny Times, Comic Relief, Detroit News, Utne Reader, The Catalyst, Pacific Sun and The Door. In addition, Berman has appeared in Harper's, Ms., San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Z, New Woman, Chicago Times, Glamour, Mademoiselle, Vegetarian Times, Ethics, and other periodicals. (A cool sidenote: Jennifer's cartoons have appeared in Krokodil, the same paper in St. Petersburg that her grandfather cartooned for before the Russian Revolution!). Her work has been included in the Penguin Book of Women's Humor, Creme de la Femme, Women's Glibber, Kitty Libber, The Best Contemporary Women's Humor and other anthologies and in many textbooks whose topics range from ethics to pets to sexual politics.

Jennifer lives in Southwestern Ohio with cats Henry and June, four dogs (Lucy, Isaac, Oliver and Georgette), two Sicilian miniature donkeys (Ferdinand and Isabel), husband Matt, and Kids Joseph and Eliza.

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