San Antonio novelist, playwright, one-time Current columnist Jack Sibley has died

William Jack Sibley penned the Current’s San Antonio Eccentrics column and a whole lot more. Credit: Facebook / William Jack Sibley

Multifaceted writer William Jack Sibley, who penned the Current’s San Antonio Eccentrics column in the late aughts and early 2010s, died unexpectedly at a San Antonio hospital on Aug. 31, according to friends.

The 72-year-old was an energetic storyteller, equally adept at bringing tales to life on the written page or in conversation. In addition to a trio of novels, he penned plays, screenplays, served as a contributing editor at Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine, composed dialogue for TV shows including Guiding Light and Murphy Brown and worked on his family’s ranches.

“I’m just your common, everyday, New York City, Texas, rancher playwright novelist,” Sibley told the Express-News in 2021 after the publication of his novel Here We Go Loop De Loop, the third installment in a series highlighting unusual characters in rural Texas.

The fourth novel in that series, The Hang of It, is expected to release soon, his family said in an online obituary.

Sibley was born in Corpus Christi and moved to upstate New York in 6th grade , according to the obit. Later, while living in Scarsdale, north of New York City, he began taking acting classes. His time attending college in Austin hurled him into radio, TV and film.

After time in New York, LA and elsewhere, Sibley settled in San Antonio, living in a River Road home designed by renowned architect Don B. McDonald that associates describe as being full of eclectic art.

Between work on his novels and travels that he wrote up for magazines and newspapers, the fifth-generation rancher would drive to the his family’s cattle operation in Atascosa County to help out his siblings, the obituary notes.

“Every time we introduced [Sibley] to one of our friends, we would go on and on about how glamorous he was — how he once kissed Andy Warhol on the street in New York, he was an announcer at Sea World but couldn’t get Shamu to perform, he was a flight attendant for Braniff in the groovy ’70s!” friend Vicky Dewey, a San Antonio architect, said in a statement she read at the author’s memorial, held Wednesday.

“I hadn’t even heard of Braniff before meeting Bill, but we loved being part of his fascinating universe,” she added. “He was just so worldly and yet completely down to earth.”

Former Current Editor-in-Chief Elaine Wolff brought Sibley onboard to write his San Antonio Eccentrics column, which spotlighted colorful local personalities such as Karlos (with a “K”) Anzoategui and Polly Lou Livingston.

“Once we became acquainted in person, I realized that [Sibley] talked in the same colorful way that he wrote — and that his personality was just as big and fascinating as the wildcards he profiled,” Current Contributing Arts Editor Bryan Rindfuss said of his contribution.

“He was perhaps the greatest ‘eccentric’ in the bunch and had all the stories to back it up — from meeting Andy Warhol at Studio 54 in 1978 to writing about theater for Warhol’s magazine Interview in the 1980s,” Rindfuss added. “He was the real deal.”

Sibley was inaugurated into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2015, joining it prestigious ranks in a class that included fellow San Antonians Nan Cuba and the late Gregg Barrios.

Subscribe to SA Current newsletters.

San Antonio novelist, playwright, one-time Current columnist Jack Sibley has died

Tags: