Tracy Slater is an American writer from Boston 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, Literary Hub, and The Chronicle Review, among other places.

Her latest nonfiction book—Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp, was published on July 8, 2025, by Chicago Review Press. The book tells the story of the Jewish American labor activist Elaine Buchman Yoneda, her Japanese American husband and fellow activist Karl Yoneda, and their imprisonment—along with their three-year-old son—in a mass incarceration camp for Japanese Americans during WWII. It has been named a Recommended Summer Read by the Jewish Book Council and has been covered by such media outlets as NPR’s Morning Edition. The book is available now directly from the publisher, online from Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and at all major bookstores.

Tracy’s 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.

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.