Tracy Thompson's Website

Tracy Thompson is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist and author.

Bio:

A 1977 Phi Beta Kappa of Emory University, Thompson began her journalism career in 1977 at the Clayton Sun in Clayton County, Georgia. From 1981 to 1989, she was a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution, where she covered federal courts. In 1984, she was awarded a fellowship at Yale Law School, where she received an MSL (Master of Studies in Law) degree. In 1987, she wrote a series for the Constitution entitled “Rural Justice,” an investigation into racial disparities in sentencing and the breakdown of the public defender system in a rural Georgia judicial circuit. It was a finalist for the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting.

In 1989, Thompson went to work for the Washington Post. In October 1992, she wrote a first-person article for the Post’s Health section chronicling her own decades-long battle with depression and a 1990 suicide attempt and psychiatric hospitalization. The article became a book, The Beast, published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in August 1995.

For that book, as well as subsequent reporting on the issue of stigma and mental illness, she was honored in February 1998 by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill for her “lasting contributions to mental health issues.” In April 1999, she won a national reporting award from the National Mental Health Association. The Beast has been published in Germany, China and Japan, and has been included in two anthologies, The Healing Circle, published in 1998 by Plume Books, and again in Out of Her Mind: Women Writing on Madness, published by Random House in January 2000. She is also the author of The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children and Struggling with Depression, published by HarperCollins in August 2006. It is based on a survey of nearly 400 mothers who have suffered from major depression,created in collaboration with Dr. Sherryl Goodman, professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta.

Since 1996, Thompson has been a freelance journalist. Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines, including The Washington Post Magazine, O, the Oprah Magazine, Washington Monthly, the New York University Law School Magazine and Civil War Times. She was a featured essayist in the 2008 collection The Maternal is Political: Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change (Seal, edited by Shari MacDonald Strong). She also is a website columnist for the Washington-based Committee of Concerned Journalists, and blogs at Maternally Challenged.

She lives in the Washington, D.C. suburbs with her husband and two daughters.


Literary agent:
Beth Vesel,
The Beth Vesel Literary Agency
212-924-4252