Featured Guests

Françoise Mouly joined The New Yorker as art editor in April 1993. She is the publisher and Editorial Director of TOON Books, a part of her small publishing house. Her new book, Blown
Covers, about the creative process behind New Yorker covers was published by Abrams in April 2012. She curated Postcards from the New Yorker, A Hundred Postcards from Ten Decades, released by Penguin in May 2012. She is the editor of Houghton Mifflin’s 2012 Best American Comics, published in October 2012.

Ms. Mouly has been responsible for over 950 covers over her tenure at The New Yorker. The American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) has chosen many of Ms. Mouly’s images as “best cover of the year.” She has curated exhibits internationally and lectured extensively on the art of New Yorker covers. In 1980, Ms. Mouly was the founder, publisher, designer and co‐editor with her husband, Art Spiegelman, of the pioneering comics anthology “RAW,” which launched artists such as Charles Burns, Sue Coe, Chris Ware, or Xavier Mariscal. In 1998, Ms. Mouly established a RAW Junior division, publishing the Little Lit collection of comics by the like of Maurice Sendak, Paul Auster, Ian Falconer, David Sedaris, Jules Feiffer, Gahan Wilson, and Neil Gaiman. In 2008, Ms. Mouly launched TOON Books, now an imprint of Candlewick Press, a collection of hardcover comics for emerging readers, which have received universal praise and multiple awards for their innovative approach. In 2012, Ms. Mouly launched, with her daughter Nadja Spiegelman, the blog “blowncovers.com” which runs weekly contests with open online submissions on themes similar to those of The New Yorker covers.

Born in Paris, Françoise Mouly studied architecture at the Beaux Arts, and moved to New York in 1974. In 2001, Ms. Mouly was named chevalier in the order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication. In 2011, she was awarded France’s highest honor, the Legion of Honneur. She and her husband live in Manhattan.