Matt Wuerker


Matt Wuerker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American political cartoonist and founding staff member of Politico.

Career

Wuerker graduated from Lewis & Clark College with a BA in 1979. While there, he served as the chief editorial cartoonist for The Pioneer Log, the weekly student newspaper.
He has published two collections of cartoons, Standing Tall in Deep Doo Doo, A Cartoon Chronicle of the Bush Quayle Years and Meanwhile in Other News... A Graphic Look at Politics in the Empire of Money, Sex and Scandal. He illustrated the book The Madness of King George by Michael K. Smith.
In August 2017, a cartoon that he drew in response to Hurricane Harvey was criticized for being insensitive to victims of the hurricane. The cartoon depicted a man in a Confederate-flag shirt being winched from a house with a "Secede" sign, as one of the rescuers points out that they had been sent by the government. A tweet from Politico containing the cartoon was later deleted.

Awards

Wuerker was the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. He was a finalist for the award in 2009 and 2010. He was awarded the 2010 Herblock Prize and the 2010 Berryman Award by the National Press Foundation.