Tracey Wilson was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey. She received M.A. from Temple University in 1992. The title of her thesis was I Don't Know Why That Caged Bird Won't Shut-Up. After graduation, she began to send her thesis out for publication. After receiving 28 rejections for that novel in one day, she developed writer's block for one year. To combat this block, Wilson took a playwriting class at the 63rd Street YMWCA in New York City. The following year she won a Van Lier Playwriting Fellowship from the New York Theatre Workshop. In September 2000, Theatre Outrageous produced her first play, Exhibit #9, an outrageous satire greatly influenced by George C. Wolfe's Colored Museum. In April of that same year, New Georges Theatre produced her second full-length play, Leader of the People. She received the Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights and was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award for her play, The Story. The Joseph Papp Public Theatre produced The Story in December 2003. Her plays have been published in Humana Festival 2006: The Complete Plays, Neon Mirage, Small World, Ten-Minute Plays from the Guthrie Theater: Volume 1 and Volume 2. She recently gave a reading at Temple University, which you can read about here.