Tracy Abeyta is a third grade dropout who didn’t get a GED but did snag three Master’s degrees. She recently graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute for American Indian Arts, where she studied alongside two distant cousins she met in the program. She was raised in a San Francisco Bay Area suburb drinking Slurpees, obsessively watching sketch comedy, and writing skits with her brother for a local cable station kid’s show. She wrote jokes on pilots for friends until she started a writing career during the pandemic.
Tracy’s published short stories in Hobart Pulp, the Brooklyn Review, Diagram, Boston Review, Epoch and Prairie Schooner. She has received support to attend Breadloaf, Kenyon Review, the Fine Arts Work Center, and Tin House conferences. She’s collaborated and co-written features and pilots in comedy and drama, and is currently working on creating an animation series.
Her ancestors on her dad’s side were in New Mexico before it was called New Mexico, and she is still mastering her grandmother’s biscochito cookie recipe. Tracy teaches literature and lives in Oakland with a free-roaming lionhead rabbit named Betty who is two pounds but can eat a tunnel through a couch.