Tracey is busy. She is an award-winning storyteller, producer of a live storytelling show, a workshop leader, story consultant and public speaker. She came to storytelling later in life, and has embraced it with the fervor of an evangelist. It is her mission to spread the transformative powers of storytelling far and wide.
Tracey launched her career in New York City in the 1990s as a reporter and editor for local newspapers and national wire services, interviewing assorted politicians, celebrities and criminals. She eventually left journalism to pursue a second career as a marketing and communications executive at two professional services firms.
Her first love, however, has always been performing, ever since the age of 10 when she was cast in the only child role in a college production of the melodrama, “Gold in the Hills – Or the Dead Sister’s Secret” (she was the dead sister’s secret). Although she gave up dreams of Broadway stardom after high school, the joy of capturing an audience’s rapt attention never left her. In 2015, she discovered the Moth Radio Hour on National Public Radio and was blown away by the realization that there was an art form where she could combine performing with the personal essays she’d been writing for years. A new dream was born.
Tracey got up the nerve to tell her first story at a Moth StorySLAM in NYC in May of 2015, won the competition that night with a story of heartbreak and redemption and went on to then win the Moth GrandSLAM competition that November. She has since won two additional Moth StorySLAMs and has been joyfully performing at storytelling and variety shows all over the New York region ever since. One of her favorite stories, about her relationship with her mother-in-law, was featured on The Moth Radio Hour’s Holiday show in December 2017. Her personal stories have also appeared on the Risk! and Story Collider podcasts.
In June 2016, Tracey launched her own storytelling show on Long Island, “Now You’re Talking.” And from November of 2016 through November 2019, she served as the Mid-Atlantic Board member for the National Storytelling Network. She teaches storytelling workshops on Long Island and in New York City and speaks at national business conferences around the country.
Tracey is the fourth of five children raised on Long Island by a Borscht-Belt comic and actress-turned-New York City English teacher. Her favorite people to hang out with are her Generation Z twins, her husband, Fred, and their mutt, Murphy.