Tracy Winn began her career in fiction at age 4, telling a lie on Ruth Ann’s Camp, a local TV show on then-fledgling PBS. (In truth, she did not then, or any other time, own a dog named Fanny. But it was the beginning of making things up to get at larger truths.) She was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her heroes have always been poets and writers. To her left lived Adrienne Rich; to her right Robert Frost. As a child, she would sit on the curb and hope she’d catch a glimpse.

For several years after she graduated from Wesleyan University where she studied with Richard Wilbur, she wrote bad poems, supporting herself as a teacher. Along the way, she became a mother, acquired an M.Ed. from Lesley University, and taught many six-year-olds to read and write.  She attended Middlebury’s Bread Loaf School of English where David Huddle’s fiction writing class – which felt so important it made her palms sweat – granted her license to blend imagination and memory. Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers deepened her craft and widened her writing community. Since then, SMU Press and Random House have published Mrs. Somebody Somebody, a collection of linked stories which won the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Prize and was a finalist for the John Gardner Book Award, the Julia Ward Howe Award and the Massachusetts Book Award.

She has been a fellow in fiction with the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Blue Mountain Center, the Vermont Studio Center, Millay, and MacDowell. Most recently, her work has appeared in Epiphany, Four Way Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Harvard Review, Solstice Magazine, and Waxwing Magazine. She co-founded and co-hosts the Unauthorized Eleanor Wilner reading series with Helen Fremont, author of The Escape Artist.

Tracy’s curiosity has taken her deep into the lives and the landscapes of New Englanders’ who work in factories, farms, forests, bars, and conservation science. Observation, experience, research, personal interviews, photographs, and stories collected by folklorists spark her work. In settings, both urban and rural, her stories rise from the complications of love, labor, and natural history.

Tracy raised her daughter and lives with her husband in the Boston area and in Vermont, where she rambles with her canine sidekick, Pie, and stares in awe and gratitude at the natural world.