2022 Bombeck Workshop Keynoter Cathy Guisewite

Cathy Guisewite was born in Dayton, Ohio, and spent the first five “Wonder Years of Life” there before moving to Midland, Michigan — the deeply rooted Midwestern foundation she believes made the rest of her life possible.

In 1976, she created the “Cathy” comic strip, which ran in nearly 1400 newspapers for 34 years. The strip earned Cathy the National Cartoonist Society Reuben Award in 1992, an Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program for the TV special Cathy in 1987, and the high honor of having her work displayed on the fronts of refrigerators across the land. She was inducted into the Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame in 1988 and the Dayton Region’s Walk of Fame in 2017.

As the creator of “Cathy," she found her way into the hearts of readers more than 40 years ago — and has been there ever since. Her hilarious and deeply relatable look at the challenges of womanhood in a changing world became a cultural touchstone for women everywhere.

In 2019, she returned with her signature wit and warmth in a debut essay collection, Fifty Things That Aren’t My Fault, about another time of big transition, “when everything starts changing and disappearing without permission: aging parents, aging children, aging self stuck in the middle.”

Cathy wasn’t planning to draw again when the comic strip ended, but she also wasn’t planning on a global pandemic. Her new book, Scenes from Isolation, was created when Cathy lifted her head from the ice cream carton during pandemic lockdown long enough to start dumping some of her angst on paper. It’s a little scrapbook of what we survived and are still surviving — the work-from-refrigerator wear, the frustration of trying to teach Grandma to Zoom from 3000 miles away, the little shreds of hope mixed in with the sourdough bread dough.

Cathy lives in California with her handsome and charming dog, Leo.