Look and Listen

Biography

Tracy Cooper-Posey is a national award-winning writer. An Australian, she brought her family with her to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada in 1996 to marry. Tracy is a “net citizen”: She met and courted her husband on the Internet, and has coordinated discussion groups and teaching on-line. She teaches popular fiction writing both on-line and at college, and entertains students and the public with anecdotes and insights into one the most antisocial professions in the world, and the peculiar industry it drives. In 1994 Tracy won the Emma Darcy Award for novelists, for her novel Eyes of a Stranger, and repeated her success by placing fourth in the 1998 competition with Diana by the Moon. She has been nominated for the Carol Anne Sorel Encouragement Award for writers, and was awarded the Sherlock Holmes Society of Western Australia’s Best Pastiche Award for her Sherlockian novel Chronicles of the Lost Years -- a Sherlock Holmes Mystery. Diana by the Moon was nominated for Best Original eBook in the prestigious Frankfurt eBook Awards for 2000. Her short stories and articles have appeared in various Canadian and Australian magazines and periodicals, and on the Internet. So far Tracy’s life has encompassed an eighteen month stint on war-ravaged Bougainville Island in Papua New Guinea, and at various times she has been a secretary, office clerk, single mother, freelance writer, public speaker, columnist, law student, international traveler, writing teacher, advertising production coordinator (for a national newsmagazine), web-press production coordinator, and the first female cinematograph operator in Western Australia. Most recently she was the editor and managing editor of WHERE Edmonton magazine, and she also teaches creative writing at Grant MacEwan College. She currently lives in Edmonton with her husband and their blended family of three children.

Inspiration

I grew up wild. No television, no other children, in a tiny wheat-belt town in Western Australia. When I was nine, I discovered books. Adventure stores. Enid Blyton, then LORD OF THE RINGS. I've been reading ever since. STAR WARS was released when I was a young teenager and I was hooked. The movie prompted me to write the unofficial sequel -- and this was years before fan fiction became a commonly accepted practice. I've been writing ever since.