Tracy Thompson

I am an author and essayist who has written about subjects ranging from psychiatry to law to the Civil War. My work has been featured in Torn: True Stories of Kids, Career and the Conflict of Modern Motherhood, ed. by Samantha Parent Walravens (Coffeetown Press, 2011), The Maternal is Political: Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change, ed. by Shari MacDonald Strong (Seal Press, 2008) and Out of Her Mind: Women Writing on Madness, ed. by Rebecca Shannonhouse (The Modern Library, 2000). My 1995 book The Beast: A Reckoning with Depression and my 2006 book The Ghost in the House--one a first-person account of my own struggles with depression, the other a distillation of more than 400 interviews with women trying to deal with the illness while raising children--as well as my reporting on mental health issues for the Washington Post, has won awards from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and the National Mental Health Association.

In my former life--before kids--I was a newspaper reporter who wrote about courts and legal affairs for the Washington Post and, before moving to Washington, for my hometown paper, the Atlanta Constitution. In 1988, I was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting for a series I wrote for the Constitution on racial disparities in sentencing and the breakdown of the public defender system in a rural Georgia judicial circuit.

At the moment I am at work on a book for Simon & Schuster on what it means to be a Southerner at a time when many people say "the South" is disappearing. Fear not, fellow Southerners: it's not, and it won't.

I live just outside Washington, D.C. with my husband, our two daughters, one tabby cat and an enthusiastic beagle named Max. You can reach me via my agent, Beth Vesel, at The Beth Vesel Literary Agency at 212-924-4252.