Baylor, Byrd
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Personality
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System number
987007429331105171
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Information for Authority record
Name (Latin)
Baylor, Byrd
Other forms of name
Schweitzer, Byrd Baylor
Date of birth
1924-03-28
Date of death
2021-06-16
Gender
female
MARC
MARC
Sources of Information
- Facebook, post by Michael Hyatt, March 24, 2026, viewed March 24, 2026(Byrd Baylor, born 3/28/1924 in San Antonio; migrated west; following a career as a social worker and author, she settled in Arivaca, AZ; novelist, essayist, and creator of 26 illustrated award-winning books that reflected her deep love for the flora, fauna and people of the Southwest; donated part of her Arivaca property to the No More Deaths camp; at the time of this portrait [photo] in 2008, she was receiving chemotherapy for a malignant tumor; didn't like the side effects, quit treatment, and lived for another 13 years)
- author and activist Byrd Baylor, whose picture books reflected deep appreciation for the Southwest and the Native American cultures she loved, died on June 16 in Tucson, Ariz., age 97; born March 28, 1924 in San Antonio, Tex.; her father, who worked on oil rigs and in precious metal mines, moved the family to Tucson when she was 5 or 6; spent her childhood exploring outdoors; studied creative writing at the University of Arizona, left in her junior year when she married a young naval officer and moved to San Francisco; returned to Tucson after the marriage ended, began working as a reporter for the Tucson Daily Citizen in 1951, writing about arts, then about people on the Tohono O'odham Reservation, poverty in Tucson, and other social justice issues; freelance writer as of 1955; published her first children's book, Amigo, about a boy who befriends a prairie dog, in 1963; she has remarried and published Amigo and 3 other titles in the 1960s under the name Byrd Baylor Schweitzer, reverted to Baylor after the marriage ended; in the 1970s she published at least one picture book annually, with a variety of illustrators; When Clay Sings (1972), illustrated by Tom Bahti, won a 1973 Caldecott Honor, the first of 4 her titles would receive; also fought to protect native wildlife and to help local Native American people in need; her only novel, Yes Is Better Than No (1977), follows a Native American family that wins a swimming pool in a lottery but doesn't know what to do with it because they don't have running water; beginning in the 1980s she lived off the grid in an adobe house her friends helped her build on over 35 acres of land in Arivaca, southwest of Tucson; in the early 2000s she joined forces with No More Deaths, providing food and water to undocumented migrants from Mexico, and letting the group build the Byrd Camp on her property, now running for 16 years; lived in Tucson with grandson Jesse Stanley since the 2010s ( (Publishers Weekly website, Obituary: Byrd Baylor, July 1, 2021, viewed March 23, 2026) )
- Her Before you came this way, 1969.
- Her The way to make perfect mountains, c1997:CIP t.p. (Byrd Baylor) data sheet (b. Mar. 28, 1924)