The following piece is presented as part of Illustrated PEN: 2017 PEN World Voices Festival Edition, a special edition of the Illustrated PEN that highlights participants of next week’s PEN World Voices Festival. The New Yorker‘s Liza Donnelly introduces Rayma Suprani, a Venezuelan cartoonist born in Caracas. For 19 years, Suprani published her cartoons in El Universal. She is Member of Cartooning for Peace Association and one of the protagonists of the film Caricaturists—Foot Soldiers of Democracy. Donnelly will moderate the panel Women in Ink at the PEN World Voices Festival featuring Suprani along with Roz Chast, Liana Finck, and Emily Flake. 

Donnelly writes: Rayma’s work consistently expresses complex ideas in a few strokes.  Always a joy to look at, her drawings often express a level of anger at injustice—and then she uses her easy humor to point to the ridiculousness of it all. An exile from Venezuela living in the United States, Rayma’s view is unique and vital, in large part because of what she had to endure as a political cartoonist and a woman in her native country.

Rayma Suprani Is a Venezuelan press cartoonist who was born in Caracas. For 19 years, she published her cartoons in El Universal in Venezuela.

She is Member of Cartooning for Peace Association and one of the protagonists of the film Caricaturists—Foot Soldiers of Democracy, by Stéphanie Valloatto. In 2015, she gave conferences on the defense of human rights for Freedom House and the Oslo Freedom Forum.