Tracy Slater is an American writer from Boston who is now living temporarily in Toronto, although her family is usually based in Japan, her husband's country. Her essays and articles have been published New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Time magazine's Made by History, The Best Women's Travel Writing, The Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, and The Chronicle Review, among other places.
Her first book, the memoir The Good Shufu: Finding Love, Self and Home on the Far Side of the World, was published in 2015 by G.P. Putnam's Sons, a division of Penguin Random House, and was named a Barnes & Nobles Discover Great New Writers Selection, a National Geographic Traveler Great New Read, an Amazon Editor’s Pick in Best Biographies and Memoirs, and one of PopSugar's best books of 2015. The book was also translated into Japanese (under the title 米国人博士、大阪で主婦になる) by the Tokyo-based publisher Aki Shobo.
Her latest nonfiction book—Together in Manzanar, about the Jewish American labor activist Elaine Buchman Yoneda, her mixed Jewish/Japanese American family, and their incarceration in a U.S. WWII concentration camp—is forthcoming in July 2025 from Chicago Review Press. It can be pre-ordered online now directly from the publisher, online from IndieBound or Amazon, or at all major bookstores.
Tracy received her Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Brandeis University and taught for ten years at various Boston-area universities as well as in men's and women's prisons throughout Massachusetts. She is also the founder of Four Stories, a global literary series in Boston, Osaka, and Tokyo, for which she was awarded the PEN New England’s Friend to Writers Award in 2008.