Tracy Fuad was born in Minnesota to an American mother and Kurdish father. She studied Political Science at Northwestern University and taught middle school in New York City before earning an MFA in Poetry at Rutgers-Newark. Much of her debut collection of poetry was written while the author was living in Iraqi Kurdistan, where she taught English at a public university. She is a 2021-2022 Poetry Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and teaches poetry at the Berlin Writers' Workshop.