About Tracy Trivas

Tracy Trivas grew up in West Hartford, Connecticut, a town that held autumn spelling bees and bobbing for apples contests. Huge weeping willow trees that kids loved to swing on cascaded over her neighborhood, and all the houses on her street were built on land that was once owned by Noah Webster. His centuries old, red saltbox house lay over the brook and up the hill from her home. In the summer she and her friends would pick juicy, wild raspberries and wondered if Noah had planted the original seedlings.

In elementary school the students started their day with 30 minutes of quiet journaling. To this day, Tracy credits that simple exercise and an immense love of reading as to why she always loved to write. Maybe it gave the teachers an extra 30 minutes to plan, but for Tracy, it set in motion, sparked a daily practice–of free writing, without judgment and just for joy.

Also, in those seminal first few years, the town had volunteers from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art come into schools and share giant copies of paintings. Hearing about secret symbols and stories hidden inside each painting ignited an early love of art. 

At Dartmouth College, Tracy continued to love writing and art, majoring in Art History and living in Florence, Italy, for six months. She then won a Dartmouth Graduate Fellowship to study Victorian Literature at Oxford before completing her master’s degree in English from Middlebury College. 

Tracy lived for many years in California and now lives back on the east coast with her husband, children, and one fluffy white cat with ice-blue eyes and a long black tail.