comics anthology “RAW,” which she co-edited along with her husband, cartoonist Art Spiegelman. RAW first brought acclaim to artists such as Charles Burns, Sue Coe, Gary Panter, Chris Ware, Lorenzo Mattotti, Joost Swarte, Xavier Mariscal, and many others. It is also the magazine where “Maus,” Mr. Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book on the Holocaust, was first published. From 1987 to 1995, Ms. Mouly edited and designed books for Pantheon and Penguin Books.

Responsible for over 800 covers over her past seventeen years at The New Yorker, Ms. Mouly has in addition lectured on and written extensively about New Yorker covers. In 2000, she published “Covering The New Yorker: Cutting-Edge Covers from a Literary Institution.” Ms. Mouly guest-curated exhibits at the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, at the Wilhelm-Busch Museum in Hanover, as well as curating The Art of The New Yorker: Eighty Years in the Vanguard, at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA. The American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) chose two of Ms. Mouly’s covers as among the “top 40 most highly recognized, memorable, influential, compelling and iconic magazine covers of the past forty years. “ For the three years since the award was instituted, Ms. Mouly’s work received the honor of being ASME’s “best cover of the year.”

In 2000, Ms. Mouly launched a RAW Junior division, publishing books of comics for kids by star writers, children's book artists and cartoonists such as Maurice Sendak, Paul Auster, Ian Falconer, David Sedaris, Jules Feiffer, Lemony Snicket, Gahan Wilson, and Neil Gaiman. The LITTLE LIT books have been New York Times bestsellers, and a paperback anthology, BIG FAT LITTLE LIT, was published in 2006. In the spring of 2008, Ms. Mouly launched TOON Books, her own imprint of hardcover comics for emerging readers, which have received universal praise and multiple awards for their innovative approach. Benny and Penny in The Big No-No! by Geoffrey Hayes was nominated by the ALA as the Theodor Seuss Geisel Award in 2010 as “the most distinguished American book for beginning readers published in English in the United States during the preceding year.” Two other TOON Books, Stinky by Eleanor Davis and Little Mouse by Jeff Smith were also chosen as Honor books to the Geisel Award. Susan Veltfort, the chair of the 2010 Geisel committee, has said that “the TOON Books expand what’s possible for beginning readers.” (cf. TOON-Books.com for other awards.)
In 2009, Abrams ComicArts published Ms. Mouly’s The TOON Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics, where, together with Spiegelman, she compiled an unprecedented collection of the greatest classic comics for children. Ian Chipman raved in a starred review in Booklist: “If there’s a word with more urgency than essential, then that’s what this comics cornerstone is for libraries.”

Born in Paris, Françoise Mouly studied architecture at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des 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. She and her husband live in Manhattan. Their older child, Nadja Spiegelman, is the author of Zig and Wikki in Something Ate my Homework, which will be published by TOON Books in April 2010.