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Meet Signe Wilkinson
Signe Wilkinson was born in the depths of the baby boom and graduated from her suburban Philadelphia high school about the same year the SAT scores began their slide. After acquiring a BA in English from a western university of middling academic reputation, Wilkinson was unprepared for real work ... so she became a reporter, stringing for the West Chester (PA) Daily Local News. She also worked for the Quakers, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and with a housing project in Cyprus, a job that ended with a bang when a coup d'etat was followed by a military invasion from Turkey. Since then, Wilkinson has felt that a little multi-culturalism goes a long way. Back in the newsroom, Wilkinson began drawing the people she was supposed to be reporting on. She realized cartooning combined her interests in art and politics without taxing her interest in spelling. After a year of remedial art school, including a stint at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, she began freelancing at several Philadelphia and New York publications, finally landing a full-time job at the San Jose Mercury News in 1982. After 3 1/2 years on a steep learning curve, Wilkinson repaid her long-suffering Mercury News editor by taking a job at the Philadelphia Daily News, where she has been drawing contentedly ever since. In addition to her five cartoons a week for the Daily News, Wilkinson has drawn mulch-based cartoons for Organic Gardening magazine, mortarboard-based cartoons for the Institute for Research on Higher Education and water-based cartoons for the University Barge Club newsletter. "How to Grow the $735 Tomato" is the title of her 1999 gardening calendar. Her awards include the 1992 Pulitzer Prize, the 1991 Berryman Award and 1997 Overseas Press Club Award. Her most cherished honor was being named "the Pennsylvania state vegetable substitute" by the speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in 1989. Wilkinson was the 1994-1995 president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, a job Molly Ivins likens to running a nursery school. Wilkinson values her intensely unremarkable family life which is marked by her interest in growing outdoor lilies, killing indoor orchids, finding an easy way to match her husband's socks and trying to figure out the best way to answer the question, "Mom--exactly what was the stain on the blue dress?"
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