ABOUT | Sarah Bird Books

About Sarah

Sarah Bird is the author of 11 novels. Her latest, Last Dance on the Starlight Pier, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in April 2022. Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on one woman—and a nation—struggling to be reborn from the ashes. Visit the Books section for more information on all of her novels.

Sarah was born in 1949 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her father was an officer in the U.S. Air Force. Sarah and her family—a Catholic family

of eight, including her mother, Colista Bird—travelled with him around the the world during her childhood. She earned a BA degree from the University of New Mexico and an MA degree in journalism from the

Read Sarah’s contributions to
Texas Monthly

University of Texas at Austin. Sarah and her husband, George Jones, live in Austin, Texas, with their son and, arguably, the cutest corgi in the world.

Sarah was selected as the permanent greeter—via a hologram—at the main branch of the Austin Public Library

During the mid-1980s, Bird was a founding contributing editor to Austin’s Third Coast magazine, for which she wrote numerous feature articles. Her first published novel was a mystery, Do Evil Cheerfully, published as Sarah McCabe Bird. In 1986, her comic novel Alamo House, based on her experience as a graduate student at the University of Texas, was published.

In addition to her novels, Sarah has written screenplays for television and magazine articles for national women’s magazines. Bird adapted her novel The Boyfriend School

into a screenplay for the 1990 movie Don’t Tell Her It’s Me, starring Shelley Long and Steve Guttenberg. She has also written screenplays for the National Geographic Channel and Hallmark, as well as the CBS movie Yesterday’s Children.

During her 10-year screenwriting career, Sarah worked for Paramount, CBS, Warner

Brothers, National Geographic, ABC and TNT, as well as several independent producers. In 2015, she was selected for the Meryl Streep/Oprah Winfrey Screenwriters’ Lab.

Sarah has also been an NPR Moth Radio Hour storyteller, as well as a contributing writer for O: The Oprah Magazine, the New York Times Sunday Magazine and op/ed columns, Chicago Tribune, Real Simple, Mademoiselle, Glamour, Salon, The Daily Beast, Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping and The Texas Observer. She is a regular columnist for Texas Monthly magazine.