Jerry Craft author page

Jerry Craft biography

Jerry Craft is an American cartoonist and children’s book illustrator, best known for his syndicated comic strip Mama’s Boyz and his graphic novels New Kid, Class Act, and School Trip. Born in Harlem in 1963, he grew up in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. Craft attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Media Arts from the School of Visual Arts in 1984.

Early in his career, Craft worked as a copywriter for advertising agencies and contributed to comic projects for Marvel and Harvey Comics. He later joined King Features Syndicate, where he wrote sales brochures and developed Mama’s Boyz, a comic strip that debuted in 1995. The strip, which follows the lives of an African American single mother and her two sons, was syndicated in numerous newspapers until 2013.

In 2019, Craft published New Kid, a semi-autobiographical graphic novel about a 12-year-old African American boy navigating a predominantly white private school. The book received critical acclaim and made history in 2020 by becoming the first graphic novel to win the Newbery Medal. It also earned the Coretta Scott King Author Award and the Kirkus Prize for Young Readers’ Literature. New Kid was followed by two companion novels: Class Act in 2020 and School Trip in 2023.

Throughout his career, Craft has been recognized with numerous awards, including the 2013 Glyph Award for Best Comic Strip or Webcomic for Mama’s Boyz and multiple African American Literary Awards. He has also served as editorial director of the Sports Illustrated for Kids website and co-founded the Schomburg Center’s Annual Black Comic Book Festival in New York City.