Free Press political cartoonist Matt Bors will be among the featured speakers during the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum Grand Opening Festival of Cartoon Art today through Sunday Nov. 17 in Sullivant Hall on the campus of the Ohio State University. Bors will be joined by other notable cartoonists including Brian Bassett, Stephen Pastis, Hilary Price, Jeff Smith and many others. Bors, who will also be honored at the 2013 Annual Free Press Awards dinner on Monday (see page 10), has been a nationally syndicated editorial cartoonist through Universal Features since the age of 23. He was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist in 2012, and winner of the Herblock Prize for Excellence in Cartooning as well as the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Award. He published his first graphic novel, War is Boring, in 2010 and is currently the comics journalism editor for Cartoon Movement. Bassett is the creator of the comic strip Red and Rover which was launched in 2000, and won the 2013 award for Best Newspaper Comic Strip of the Year by the National Cartoonists Society. After attending The Ohio State University, he worked as an editorial cartoonist for the Seattle Times where he began his strip Adam, which later became Adam@Home. Basset’s space-themed Red and Rover comic strips were honored with an exhibit at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. In 2005. Pastis is the creator of the internationally syndicated Pearls Before Swine. He has been nominated for multiple Reuben Awards, and was the winner of the Best Newspaper Comic Strip from the National Cartoonist Society in 2003 and 2006. He became a New York Times Best Selling author in 2013 with the debut of his first children's book Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made, published by Candlewick Press. Price has been creating her daily internationally syndicated comic strip Rhymes With Orange since 1995, and has also been published in People magazine, Forbes, Glamour, and The Funny Times. She won the Best Newspaper Panel award from the National Cartoonist's Society in 2006 and 2009. Hilary teaches gag writing workshops, and her strip has been collected in three books since 1997. Smith launched his company Cartoon Books in 1991 to begin self-publishing his now internationally renowned comic book Bone. He has won multiple Eisner and Harvey awards, and his work was featured in the exhibit Jeff Smith: Bone and Beyond at The Wexner Center for the Arts in 2008. Smith is an alumni of The Ohio State University, and his characters from Bone first appeared in his comic strip Thorn for The Lantern student paper. He is also the creator of RASL, and is currently working on a new webcomic series Tuki: Save the Humans. The Festival is co-sponsored by the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, University Libraries, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Popular Culture program, Project Narrative, Office of Diversity and Inclusion and the Humanities Institute. A Festival schedule and other information can be found at: http://cartoons.osu.edu/sites/FCA/2013/index.html