Pullen, Zachary

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Pullen, Zachary

Personal

Male.

Addresses

Home—Casper, WY. E-mail—zak@zacharypullen.com.

Career

Illustrator, caricature artist, and author of books for children.

Awards, Honors

Blue Ribbon Picture Book Award, 2004, for The Toughest Cowboy by John Frank.

Writings

SELF-ILLUSTRATED

Friday My Radio Flyer Flew, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2008.

ILLUSTRATOR

Phil Bildner, The Greatest Game Ever Played: A Football Story, Putnam's (New York, NY), 2006.

Kay Winters, John Appleseed: A Trail of Trees, National Geographic (Washington, DC), 2007.

John Frank, The Toughest Cowboy; or, How the Wild West Was Tamed, Aladdin (New York, NY), 2008.

Marty Sederman, Casey and Derek on the Ice, Chronicle Books (San Francisco, CA), 2008.

Contributor of illustrations to periodicals, including Sports Illustrated.

Sidelights

Wyoming-based illustrator and caricature artist Zachary Pullen is best known for his work in nationally known periodicals such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Pullen, who works in oil paints, is also recognized for incorporating unusual perspectives in both his political drawings and his book illustration. In addition to creating the original picture book Friday My Radio Flyer Flew, which a Kirkus Reviews writer dubbed a "sparely told but visually dramatic tribute" to the classic metal toy wagon, Pullen contributed artwork to Phil Bildner's The Greatest Game Ever Played: A Football Story and John Frank's The Toughest Cowboy; or, How the Wild West Was Tamed, the latter a quirky western tale about an unusual character named Grizz Brickbottom. "Tall tales this enjoyable are hard to find," exclaimed Blair Christolon in an appraisal of The Toughest Cowboy for School Library Journal, and the critic added that "gross visual and verbal jokes abound" in Pullen's "spot-on renditions of the Wild West." "Pullen's comical oil paintings, with their stunning Western landscapes and deliberately distorted cowboy caricatures," suit Frank's engaging "read-aloud to a T," concluded a Kirkus Reviews contributor.

Reviewing The Greatest Game Ever Played, which recounts a crucial game played during the 1958 championship football season, Booklist contributor Ilene Cooper concluded that, despite being somewhat distracting "the energy" of Pullen's caricature-style paintings "perfectly matches Bildner's lively text," and Marilyn Taniguchi concluded in School Library Journal that the characters' "comically exaggerated facial expressions … balance the story's nostalgic mood." "An intriguing balance of realism and caricature," Pullen's work "scores a win," concluded a Publishers Weekly in a laudatory review of The Greatest Game Ever Played.

Biographical and Critical Sources

PERIODICALS

Booklist, August, 2004, Michael Cart, review of The Toughest Cowboy; or, How the Wild West Was Tamed, p. 1942; September 1, 2006, Ilene Cooper, review of The Greatest Game Ever Played: A Football Story, p. 117.

Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2004, review of The Toughest Cowboy, p. 629; July 1, 2006, The Greatest Game Ever Played, p. 674; April 15, 2008, review of Friday My Radio Flyer Flew.

Publishers Weekly, September 20, 2004, review of The Toughest Cowboy, p. 62; July 24, 2006, review of The Greatest Game Ever Played, p. 57.

School Library Journal, August, 2004, Blair Christolon, review of The Toughest Cowboy, p. 86; August, 2006, Marilyn Taniguchi, The Greatest Game Ever Played, p. 74.