Writer-at-large Sarah Bird is a best-selling novelist, screenwriter, essayist, and journalist. She has been an NPR Moth Radio Hour storyteller, a nine-time winner of the Austin Chronicle’s best fiction writer award, a finalist for the International Dublin Literary Award, and an Alex Award nominee. Her books have been included on the Library Journal Best Books, Amazon Best Books of the Year, Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers, and New York Public Libraries Books to Remember lists. She is a Texas Literary Hall of Fame honoree and was a Dobie Paisano fellow.
She has written for O magazine, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Texas Observer,Texas Highways, Slate, the Daily Beast, and Salon, and she was the back-page columnist for Texas Monthly for five years starting in 2005. During a ten-year career as a screenwriter, she wrote for Warner Bros., TNT, Paramount, Hallmark, National Geographic, ABC, CBS, and many independent producers. In 2015 she was selected to attend Meryl Streep’s Writers Lab.
Bird cofounded the Writers League of Texas, is the 2020 winner of the University of New Mexico’s Paul Bartlett Ré Peace Prize, and was selected as the “hologram” greeter at Austin Central Library in 2017.
Her latest book, A Juneteenth Rodeo: Let’s Go! Let’s Show! Let’s Rodeo!, a book of photos she shot at Black rodeos while working as a photojournalist in the late 1970s, will be published by UT Press on Juneteenth 2024.
After a nomadic Air Force childhood, Bird is happy to have found a forever home in Austin with her G-men—George and Gabriel—and Collie, arguably the world’s cutest corgi.
Organized crime! Illicit booze! The beach! In this exclusive excerpt from her new novel ‘Last Dance on the Starlight Pier,’ Sarah Bird explores Galveston at the end of the twenties, a setting she calls “a gift to a novelist.”
When Dallas’s very own Marvin Lee Aday—that’s Meat Loaf to you—optioned one of my screenplays, he didn’t just offer me a glimpse of paradise by the dashboard lights. He also helped me write a novel.
Every female on earth believes she can dance. My big break came when a Bob Hope wannabe with shiny suits and a pinkie ring took me on as his sidekick for a two-week tour of Tokyo.
In this excerpt from writer-at-large Sarah Bird’s new novel, How Perfect Is That, the realities of life in early twenty-first century Austin become all-too-clear to a defrocked socialite.
There is a world where the kings of small African countries send cases of Dom Pérignon as hostess gifts, where you get to choose between the white-striped chinchilla and the violet beaver shearling poncho. Who let me in?
Ladies’ fashion is nothing if not a fantasy inside an illusion wrapped in a thong. Every season, there is a new “look,” a new “trend,” a new “paranoid schizophrenic thought disorder.” And then there are returns.
