Caroline Tracey

Caroline Tracey is the inaugural On the Brinck | Places Prize winner.

Tracey’s first book, Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History, will be published by W.W. Norton in March 2026. Her reporting about the U.S. Southwest, Mexico, and their borderlands appears in the New Yorker online, New York Review of Books online, High Country News, and in Spanish in Mexico’s Nexos. She is a recipient of the Waterston Prize for Desert Writing, the Ira A. Lipman Fellowship in Journalism and Human and Civil Rights, and a Silvers Foundation Work-in-Progress grant, among other honors. Tracey holds a doctorate in geography from the University of California, Berkeley. Originally from Colorado, she lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Photo Andrew Emery Brown