Caroline Eaton Tracey, writer
Photo by Andrew Emery Brown
Originally from Colorado, Caroline holds a doctorate in geography from the University of California, Berkeley. She is a recipient of the Waterston Prize for Desert Writing, the Ira A. Lipman Fellowship in Journalism and Human and Civil Rights, a Silvers Foundation Work-in-Progress grant, and an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, among other honors. In 2025 she received the inaugural On the Brinck | Places Prize for writing about the Southwest. She has also taught writing as a visiting professor at Deep Springs College.
As a journalist and critic, Caroline’s work focuses on the environment, migration, and the arts in the US Southwest, Mexico, and their borderlands. Her reporting appears in the New Yorker, n+1, New York Review of Books, High Country News, and elsewhere, as well as in Spanish in Mexico’s Nexos. Her literary and art criticism appears in the Nation, the New Republic, and elsewhere, and has been commissioned by SFMOMA and the National Gallery of Art. Read more here.
Caroline lives with her wife, Mexican architect Mariana GJP, between Tucson, Arizona and Mexico City.
She is represented by Bridget Matzie of Aevitas Creative Management.
Sign up for her newsletter here.
Salt Lakes:
An Unnatural History
In this dazzling love letter to strange and delicate waters and a moving odyssey into her own identity, Caroline Tracey takes readers across the American West and to Mexico, Argentina, and Kazakhstan to document salt lakes, their loss, and the efforts underway to save them. She explores how the lakes have reflected the fast–changing natural world through Mormon diaries, Soviet realist novels, and Australian Aboriginal paintings. And she unravels the lakes’ lessons for her own life as she finds queer love and a sense of home in an imperfect world.
An unforgettable coming–of–age story and an exquisite work of nature writing, Salt Lakes is a moving call to fight for all that is fragile in our lives.
Praise for Salt Lakes
― New York Times
"Writing about the lakes she knows well, Tracey opens up fresh perspectives. . . . She is a sincere and scrupulous guide, persuasive in her argument. . . . Tracey is alert to complexity in nature and emphasizes that saving the salt lakes does not mean restoring them to a pristine state."
― Rosa Lyster, New York Review of Books
"An eclectic book asks how humans have shaped these ‘queer’ landscapes and how they can be restored."
― Josie Glausiusz, Nature
"A tender bildungsroman. . . . holds human emotion and ecological destruction at once. . . . Tracey [has] remarkable talent and erudition.”"
― Kyle Paoletta, Baffler
"Caroline Tracey exquisitely weaves queer beauty into a narrative that is also largely about the death of the ecosystems around salt lakes. . . . The author’s very personal connection to the lakes creates an intimacy that I find unexpected from how I usually think of science writing. . . And while Salt Lakes doesn’t turn away from the dread of climate change, it does, like the wildflowers in Death Valley, offer something queer, radical in our collective moment: hope."
― August Owens Grimm, Hippocampus Magazine
"A call to protect marginal places and ways of life [that] resonates deeply."
― Kirkus Reviews
"A moving chronicle of the decline of salt lakes and [a] journey to finding queer love in a world ridden with ecological crises. . . .Vivid and tender, this is a powerful work of queer ecology."
― Publishers Weekly
"Caroline Tracey shows us the beauty, vitality, and necessity of landscapes both strange and familiar. This is nature writing as it should be."
― Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction
"Precise, lyrical, and at once deeply personal and epic, Salt Lakes brims with brine shrimp and birds and charismatic bacteria―and an unexpected sense of life pushing through against the odds. I was gripped from the first page to the last."
― Bathsheba Demuth, author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait
"Caroline Tracey explores the mysteries and beauty of salt lakes. . . Queer ecology points [her] toward a life that defies reproductive binaries, to places in between what’s deemed natural and what’s not."
― Robert Sullivan, New York Times Book Review
"Salt Lakes is a perceptive, poetic ode to one of our planet’s most vital, and most overlooked, ecosystems. Caroline Tracey plumbs law, science, and literature in a debut as gorgeous and vibrant as the lakes she loves."
― Ben Goldfarb, author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet
"A stunning illumination of a peculiar landscape, from a writer fueled by devotion, curiosity, and rapture. Caroline Tracey deftly demonstrates the human impact on fragile ecosystems, and what these ecosystems can reveal to us about ourselves. Salt Lakes made me feel a deeper kinship with the world."
― Lauren Markham, author of A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging
"Salt Lakes is not just a book of nature writing, not just a memoir, but like the salt lakes themselves, something much more wondrous and precious. Caroline Tracey leads readers through her growing understanding of herself and the strange beauty of the ecosystems around her, and along the way reminds us of the abundance and possibilities inherent in queer lives and landscapes."
― Alejandra Oliva, author of Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration
"Strange, overlooked, and unloved places find a voice in Salt Lakes, a brave and openhearted book. Caroline Tracey shows the world’s salt lakes as real places worthy of protection, but also as mirrors reflecting human history, identity, and desire."
― Melissa L. Sevigny, author of Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon
Get in Touch!
Book events: Caroline is available for author events in 2026 and beyond.
Workshops and lectures: She is available for speaking engagements, workshops, and class visits on topics including water, environmental issues in the Western US and US-Mexico borderlands, environmental and science writing, and researched memoir/“hybrid” writing.
For Salt Lakes-related author events, please contact publicist Andrew Gibeley: agibeley at wwnorton dot com
For literary rights and other related inquires, contact Bridget Matzie of Aevitas Creative Management: bmatzie at aevitascreative dot com
To drop Caroline a line directly: caroline dot e dot tracey at gmail dot com