You can take the girl out of Michigan, but she’ll never quite kick all that sand out of her shoes. Tracy grew up in the Great Lake State, where she sailed with her grandfather and swam thousands of laps for her swim team. These days she’s more likely to be found sailing off the Breton coast, but she remains a Michigander at heart.
Tracy has had newspaper smudges on her hands since taking a paper route at age 13. She has worked as a writer and editor for USATODAY.com, Gannett’s Guardian regional series in London, Deutsche Welle, the Cambridge Evening News and various other publications around Europe. She has a couple of degrees in international affairs and can speak what she calls French and a bit of German, but she’s aware she leaves the natives cringing. A former expat who lived in England for 11 years with her husband and children, Tracy is an Anglophile who is as likely to misspell colour as she is to pronounce Tube with a “ch.”
After university, she spent some time teaching French — back when she was “fluent” — in a Swiss summer boarding school near Montreux. Later, with her husband and lovely daughters, she moved from England to the stunning medieval town of Esslingen, Germany, near Stuttgart, where she spent four years making lifelong friends and soaking up Swabian culture.
She loves jazz, Arts & Crafts antiques, beagles, traveling and the theater, and she believes nothing beats the sound of her children’s laughter or Philip Roth’s prose.
