Southern Baby Talk

Mimi Pond was born and raised in San Diego. She attended the California College of Arts and Crafts and later moved to New York, where she had a busy career in the 1980s as a cartoonist and illustrator. She also wrote and illustrated five humor books, beginning with the national bestseller The Valley Girls’ Guide to Life. With her husband, artist Wayne White, she moved to Los Angeles in 1990 and has continued to write and to draw web comics for numerous national magazines and websites such as The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, Topic, and The Paris Review. In 2014, her graphic novel, Over Easy (Drawn & Quarterly), a fictionalized account of her post-art-school waitressing career in Oakland in the late 1970s, garnered dozens of positive reviews, was a New York Times bestseller, and won a 2014 PEN Award. The second volume to this book, The Customer Is Always Wrong (Drawn & Quarterly), was published in 2017. She is currently at work on a graphic nonfiction book about Britain’s storied Mitford sisters, to be published in 2022 by Drawn & Quarterly.