We’re excited to announce that this blog will now feature the special perspectives that award-winning cartoonist and Memphian Bill Day brings to the day’s news.

His cartoons start today, and we look forward to a long relationship with him.  We have no doubt that you’ll enjoy his cartoons as much as we have for years, including 11 at The Commercial Appeal.

His syndicated cartoons are distributed to more than 900 newspapers three times a week by CagleCartoons.com.

Mr. Day is a two-winner of the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Award and five-time winner of the Green Eyeshade Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. He’s also won a variety of other prominent honors for his outstanding work.

Memphis is lucky to have his gifts as part of our community, and we are proud to showcase his work here.

Here’s his official bio:

Bill Day’s award-winning cartoons are syndicated in more than 900 newspapers worldwide three times a week through CagleCartoons.com syndication service. The recipient of two Robert F. Kennedy Awards — 2010 and 1985, he has also been honored with the National Headliner Award, the John Fischetti Award, First Amendment Award, New York Newspaper Guild’s Page One Award, National Cartoonists Society’s Award for Best Editorial Cartoons, The 2010 National Press Foundation Award of ‘Special Merit’, and James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism.

Mr. Day has won the Green Eyeshade Award from the Society of Professional Journalists five times — in 2009, 2006, 2005, 2001, and 2000. He has also won second place in this award five times.
Mr. Day’s work is widely reprinted in major national magazines including Newsweek, Time, and Business Week.

His defense of the oppressed and their condition is a deep and eloquent theme in his work. “I have great fun drawing and using humor in my cartoons,” says Mr. Day. “But when a terrible injustice occurs, I’ll use the most powerful images possible to address it.”
Day began as a political cartoonist while studying political science and art at the University of Florida. After college, he worked as an illustrator in the art departments of a number of newspapers and drew political cartoons part-time. In 1980, the Philadelphia Bulletin hired him as a full-time political cartoonist. After the Bulletin folded, he moved to the Memphis Commercial Appeal and then to the Detroit Free Press, where he worked for thirteen years. In 1998, he returned to The Commercial Appeal and his beloved South. Through a boneheaded move by the current editor, he was laid off in 2009. Since then he has proven what a mistake it was.

Day and his wife Susan have three teenage sons, Sam, Robby, and Zack.