Sandra Boynton

Sandra Keith Boynton (born April 3, 1953) is an American humorist, songwriter, director, music producer, children's author, and illustrator. Boynton has written and illustrated over eighty-five books for children and seven general audience books, she received a Special Master's Magna solemnly bestowed by Charles Davis, the Master of Boynton's residential college, Calhoun College. Unbeknownst to the graduation audience, the honor was actually a fiction. Boynton's grade point average did not in fact entitle her to any degree honor; but shortly before the ceremony, she had told Professor Davis in mock earnest that "my parents are here, so I'd really appreciate it if you could just mumble some Latin after my name".

Boynton intended to become a theater director. She attended the University of California, Berkeley for a year for graduate studies in drama, then transferred to the Yale School of Drama D.F.A. program; however, she did not complete the program. With the birth of her first child in 1979, Boynton postponed indefinitely a career in the theater, judging the demands of that profession not easily compatible with raising a family.

During her undergraduate and graduate years, her teachers included Cleanth Brooks, Harold Bloom, Richard B. Sewall, Maynard Mack, Maurice Sendak, Richard Gilman, Rocco Landesman, David Milch, Stanley Kauffmann, and William Arrowsmith. In an autobiographical talk given at Yale in 2002, "The Curious Misuse of a Yale Education", Boynton refers to her book Grunt (an illuminated book and recording of plainchant in Latin and Pig Latin) as "the culmination of a lifetime spent joyfully squandering an expensive education on producing works of no apparent significance".

Career Greeting cards Boynton's greeting card designs for Recycled Paper Greetings were at the forefront of the Alternative Cards commercial movement that began in the mid-1970s. According to RPG co-founder and president Mike Keiser, nearly 500 million copies of Boynton's distinctive humorous cards—featuring an assortment of unnamed cartoon animal characters, spare layout, and droll messages—sold between 1973 and 2003. A 1975 birthday card bearing images of four animals and the message "Hippo Birdie Two Ewes", a pun playing on the phrase "Happy Birthday to You", has sold over ten million copies to date. Music videos In 2008, Boynton ventured into filmmaking, creating and directing music videos of her most popular recorded songs. Her first music video released in November 2009 as a book/DVD combination, was "One Shoe Blues", starring B.B. King and a cast of assorted sock puppets. Then she directed "Penguin Lament" starring John Ondrasik of Five for Fighting, "Philadelphia Chickens" which is mostly animation and includes cameos by Kevin Bacon and Michael Bacon, and "Be Like a Duck" which features all four of her children.

Awards Boynton received the Irma Simonton Black Award for Chloe and Maude , the National Parenting Publications Gold Medal for Barnyard Dance and for Your Personal Penguin, a Grammy Award Nomination for Philadelphia Chickens, the Eustace D. Theodore Fellowship (Yale University), the National Cartoonists Society Greeting Card Award for 1992, and the National Cartoonists Society Book Illustration Award for Blue Moo: 17 Jukebox Hits From Way Back Never, in 2008. She is the 2008 recipient of the Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Cartoonists Society's highest honor. Hippos Go Berserk! was awarded Mathematical Sciences Research Institute’s Mathical Hall of Fame status in 2020.

Boyton has received a number of film festival awards for her film shorts: the Rhode Island International Film Festival Providence Prize 2010 for One Shoe Blues starring B. B. King; the Flickers North Country Film Festival 2010 Crystal Image Award for emerging artist, as director of all four films; the 2D or Not 2D Animation Festival 2011 Golden Pencil Award for Philadelphia Chickens; the Forster Film Festival 2012 Winner of Song Category for "Be Like a Duck"; and the Wilmette International Children's Film Festival 2012 Best of Fest Live Action Short Film Winner for One Shoe Blues.

Personal life Boynton was married to writer and Olympic Bronze medalist (and fellow Yale graduate) Jamie McEwan from 1978 until his death from cancer in 2014. USA Today, American Profile, NPR's All Things Considered, CBS Sunday Morning, The New York Times,

Boynton works in a reconstructed 120-year-old barn on her property in rural Connecticut.