I've loved art ever since I won a first-grade drawing contest for my crayon portrait of a Thanksgiving turkey. At UCLA I picked up the copy of the school newspaper, the Daily Bruin, and spotted a political cartoon on the editorial page. I knew that was what I wanted to do.
I drew cartoons for the Daily Bruin until graduating with a B.A. in psychology in 1984. After freelancing cartoons and op-ed illustrations I landed a job as a graphic artist and cartoonist at the Orange Coast Daily Pilot in 1990.
In 1992, I joined the Ventura County Star in Southern California. I was hired as a graphic artist but managed, over the years, to carve out time from that job for editorial cartoons. By 1995, I was producing six cartoons a week. Four weeks after our daughter was born, in 1998, my wife and I moved to Missouri so I could take a job as editorial cartoonist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I produced six cartoons a week for the Post-Dispatch, tackling local, national and global issues and drawing much reader response - both glowing and growling. In 2002, I won the Scripps Howard National Journalism Award for my cartoons. In 2004, I was honored with the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.
I resigned from the Post-Dispatch in mid-December, 2003. It was a tough decision to make, because the editors had a different vision of the role of an editorial cartoonist than I did, and I felt my work was no longer a good fit for the paper. I love this profession with a passion, however, and have been able to continue producing cartoons several times a week for my former paper, the Ventura County Star, as well as for a handful of other newspapers and web sites, including the Kansas City Star, the Illinois Times, the San Jose Mercury News and American Prospect. My work is available at www.sherffiustoons.com. I continue to live in Missouri with my wife, Stephanie, and our three children, 6-year-old Hannah, 4-year-old Avery and our latest addition, Kate, who's barely four months old. None of them, so far, has shown any prize-winning ability to draw turkeys.
