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Newtown Friends Meeting to Hear Pulitzer Prize Winner, Signe Wilkinson

Newtown
Quaker Meeting to Hear Signe Wilkinson, Pulitzer Prize
Winner

Signe
Wilkinson, Pulitzer Prize winning political cartoonist with the Philadelphia
Daily News, will speak at the Newtown Meeting Adult Class at 9:45
a.m. on Sunday, December 8, at the historic Quaker Meetinghouse at 219
Court Street (http://www.newtownfriendsmeeting.org).  Meeting for Worship in the manner of Friends
will follow at 11 a.m. The public is
invited.

In Signe’s own words, “Well-armed with a BA in English
from a third-rate college, Signe Wilkinson found work in one of the few places
that would take her: a newspaper.  She
went from stringing at school board and township supervisor meetings in a rural
Pennsylvania county to drawing
about the people she encountered.  When
the paper started printing her cartoons, she found her
calling.”

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Signe Wilkinson landed her first full-time cartooning job
in 1982 at the San Jose Mercury News.  In
1985 she became the editorial cartoonist at the Philadelphia Daily News where
she has drawn ever since.

Wilkinson
is the first female cartoonist to win the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning (1992) and was once named "the
Pennsylvania
state vegetable substitute" by the former speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. She
served as president of the Association
of American Editorial Cartoonists from
1994-1995. In 2005 she published a collection of her work entitled One Nation, Under
Surveillance
.

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In addition to her editorial cartoons, she drew the daily
comic strip, “Family Tree” for three years. 
It is now in reruns at GoCOmics. 
Every Sunday in the Philadelphia Inquirer, her strip about life in
Philadelphia called “Penn’s Place”
leads the comic section.

Signe Wilkinson is a member of Chestnut Hill Friends
Meeting in Philadelphia where she
was active in the construction of a new meetinghouse with a widely-acclaimed
James Turrell Skyspace, which just opened this fall.    For 20 years she was a board member of
Historic Fair Hill, a Quaker project in North
Philadelphia that is still going strong.

Again in Signe’s words, “Her husband, two grown daughters
and dog Ginger all pretend to laugh at her cartoons and otherwise support her
career.”

Newtown Friends Meeting, is open to the public, with
Sunday School classes for children and adults at 9:45 a.m. and worship based on expectant silence “after the
manner of Friends” at 11 a.m.  Childcare is
provided.

 

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