This writer will not turn away from what he sees and remembers, from the sometimes painful, sometimes glorious obligations of being a storyteller.
—Edward Hirsch

I know of no other writer who so beautifully can meld the ‘experimental’ form, now subtly adapted to the needs of individual stories, with the traditional form. Tracy Daugherty is a rare American writer who can see and feel the tenor and uncertainty of our time, yet treat it with rue and gentleness, with a troubled humanist’s grace of form and language.
—Marshall Terry

Tracy Daugherty was born and raised in Midland, Texas. He is the author of six novels, a novella collection, six short story collections, a book of personal essays, and a collection of essays on literature and writing.  In addition, he has published biographies of Donald Barthelme, Larry McMurtry, Joseph Heller, Joan Didion, Billy Lee Brammer, and Mary Evershed, astronomer and Dante scholar.   A new novel, Tales from the Bayou City, is forthcoming in 2024.  Also forthcoming in 2024 is You Don’t Ever Want to Die:  George Harrison, Muhammad Ali, and the Crucible of Faith, 1964-1974.   His stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, British Vogue, The Paris Review online, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares Solos, Boulevard, Chelsea, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Triquarterly, The Southern Review, and many other journals. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Bread Loaf, Artsmith, and the Vermont Studio Center. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters and PEN, he is a five-time winner of the Oregon Book Award and recipient of the Oklahoma Book Award for Non-Fiction. At Oregon State University, he helped found the Masters of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing, and is now Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing, Emeritus.  In 2018, Literary Arts awarded him and his wife, Marjorie Sandor, the Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award for outstanding contributions to Oregon’s literary life.

His work explores the intersections of public and private lives, art, architecture, music, and science, as well as urban life and American deserts, real and imagined. As Antonya Nelson has written, “Daugherty’s characters convince the reader that metamorphosis is possible, that beauty and peace are still available options.” He “combines the serious and literary with the funny and offbeat,” says Beverly Lowry, “resulting in sparkle-plenty prose with an ear for dialogue that never fails. His stories are first-rate.”