About Sarah

Sarah Bird is the author of 11 novels, as well as other books, screenplays and magazine articles. Her latest, Juneteenth Rodeo, will be published by the University of Texas Press in June 2024. In Juneteenth Rodeo, Sarah’s camera lens captures everything—from the moment the pit master fired up his smoker, through the death-defying rides, to the last celebratory dance at a nearby honky-tonk.

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 University of Texas at Austin. Sarah and her husband, George

Read Sarah’s contributions to
Texas Monthly

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.