Raina Telgemeier

Raina Telgemeier (born 26 May 1977) is an American cartoonist from San Francisco, best known for Smile (2010), an autobiographical graphic novel for middle-grade readers published by Scholastic's Graphix imprint.

She graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2002 and self-published seven issues of the mini-comic Take-Out between 2002 and 2005. She then adapted the first four Baby-sitters Club books as graphic novels for Graphix (2006 to 2008) and co-wrote X-Men: Misfits (2009) with Dave Roman.

Smile, about her teenage years and a run of dental injuries, began as a weekly strip on the online magazine Girlamatic before Graphix published it in February 2010. It won the 2011 Eisner Award for Best Publication for Teens, and by February 2017 the paperback had spent 240 weeks on the New York Times graphic books list. Drama (2012), Sisters (2014), Ghosts (2016) and Guts (2019) followed, all New York Times bestsellers, and by 2019 her books had more than 18 million copies in print. Her publisher David Saylor credited her with creating the market for middle-grade graphic memoir. She won the Eisner for Best Writer/Artist in 2015 and 2020, and co-created The Cartoonists Club (2025) with Scott McCloud.

For collectors

The key book is the Graphix first printing of Smile (February 2010), issued in hardcover and paperback; Telgemeier said in a 2010 interview that the first print run sold out within four months. Her self-published Take-Out mini-comics are the scarcest early items.