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 in the Best Women’s Travel Writing anthology, the New York Times online, The Wall Street Journal online, The Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, The Chronicle Review, The Washington Post online, and Brain, Child Magazine online, 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.
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.
She is currently at work on a nonfiction book about the Jewish American labor activist Elaine Buchman Yoneda, her mixed Jewish/Japanese American family, and their incarceration Manzanar, a U.S. WWII Japanese American concentration camp (forthcoming in 2025 from Chicago Review Press).