Jim Toomey

Jim Toomey is an internationally published humor writer and syndicated cartoonist best known as the creator of the comic strip Sherman’s Lagoon, published daily in over 150 newspapers, including The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Chicago Tribune. It also appears in over 30 foreign countries, in French, Portuguese, Spanish, Norwegian, and Swedish. Sherman's Lagoon combines his two life-long passions: drawing and the sea. Jim's been engaged in the former activity since he could hold a crayon, and his love of the sea dates back to his early childhood. Jim has done two TED Talks, the first in April 2010, at an ocean-themed TED event in the Galapagos Islands, and the second in 2016 in Cannes, France. He has given similar talks at a variety of venues, from the Royal Society in London to Harvard University to the Monterey Bay Aquarium to his children’s kindergarten class. Jim has been interviewed in many of his client newspapers as well as National Public Radio, and Discovery Channel’s Shark Week. In 1995, he earned a Master of Arts from Stanford University, and in 2005 he returned to Duke to earn a Master of Environmental Management. In the summer of 2015, Jim and his family purchased a sailboat. They embarked on a 14,000-mile journey, which covered most of the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of Europe, some of North Africa, a trans-Atlantic jaunt, most of the Caribbean, and the east coast of the USA. The cruise ended in June 2017. He has written a travel memoir about the journey called Family Afloat.