Jeffrey Patrick Kinney (born February 19, 1971) is an American author and cartoonist, best known for the children's book series Diary of a Wimpy Kid. He also created the child-oriented website Poptropica.

Jeff Kinney was born and raised in Fort Washington, Maryland. Kinney attended Potomac Landing Elementary School and later Bishop McNamara High School, where he graduated in 1989. He has an older brother and sister, and a younger brother. He is of Irish descent. He attended the University of Maryland, College Park in the early 1990s. It was in college that Kinney created a popular comic strip, Igdoof, which ran in the school student newspaper, The Diamondback. Kinney graduated from the University of Maryland in 1993, originally majoring in computer science but switched to criminal justice in order to have more time to work on his comic. In 2021 he was inducted into Omicron Delta Kappa as an alumnus of the University of Maryland.

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