Official biography, last updated October 2009:
Tracey S. Rosenberg grew up in the Chicago suburbs, where she learned to type on an IBM Selectric, memorized entire sections of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ and cut her writing teeth on Tolkien-esque fantasy and Sherlock Holmes pastiches. Her mother was an artist and her father studied Joyce under Ellmann. After earning the first of her degrees in English Literature, she spent quite a while plotting a permanent move to Europe. Following temporary residencies in Ireland, England, and Romania, she settled in Scotland. (Thankfully, the Scots don’t seem to mind.)
High points of her life to date include winning a Fulbright scholarship, working in a secondhand bookshop where one of her job duties was to light the coal fire (she dutifully wore black fingerless gloves to support the Dickensian motif), rescuing a stray kitten from the courtyard of the American Embassy in Bucharest, earning a PhD on an Obscure Late-Victorian Author (and finally having an entry in Copac), walking the strike line with the Writers Guild, spending a month as an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation fellow at the Huntington Library, and winning a £10 Book Token for her poem about pygmy goats. As of this writing, she hasn’t decided how to spend the Book Token, but it’s likely to go towards the new A.S. Byatt.
Among other things, she likes pantoums, her iPod shuffle, the novels of George Gissing, finding other people’s train ticket stubs in secondhand books, character shoes, SweeTarts, the Edinburgh International Book Festival, flying business class, etiquette manuals from all historical periods, Persephone Books, the music of Loreena McKennitt, book swaps, Charing Cross Road, corduroy jackets, intense Call of Cthulhu campaigns, Oxford commas, and copyright libraries.
Her official answer to the ubiquitous ‘what is your favorite book?’ question is Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, but if you ask her in person, she’ll probably give you a different response, and it will take her twenty minutes to explain. You may not approve of the final answer, but you’re unlikely to get away without having a reading copy shoved into your hands.
She is no relation to those Rosenbergs though she might write about them some day.
Her motto, taken from the now-alas-defunct but deeply wonderful chicklit.com (created by Deborah Birkett), is: Smart. Witty. Literate as hell.
Ken Macleod describes her as a young American poet.
She remains dubious about the etiquette of referring to herself in the third person, but not so much as to refrain from making pointed references to it in her official biography.
She doesn’t blog about much else apart from writing, for privacy reasons (especially where it concerns the people in her life).
You can reach her by leaving a comment or by e-mailing her at (remove anything in brackets – as well as the brackets! – and turn at into a @) tsr[removethis]at[removethistoo]sff.[thundercat!]net.
