Tracy Smith, Ph.D. is a narrative nonfiction writer and designer of Africa 2027, a year-long journey exploring what belonging looks like across places, communities, and everyday encounters.

Leaving at the end of December, she will travel from West Africa and Morocco through East and Southern Africa, ending the year in Ethiopia. Through field notes, narrative essays, and video, she will document the connections she observes, the relationships that form, and the ways her own understanding of belonging changes along the way.

Tracy brings two careers to her writing: twenty years in research administration, grants, and nonprofit finance, and a doctorate in educational psychology. Through field observation and narrative, she examines how people relate to one another and build lives within families, communities, and institutions. She also writes commissioned histories for organizations seeking to understand how their systems and cultures took shape.

She is the author of The Purpose of Getting Lost, a memoir that began her exploration of movement, identity, and belonging. Across more than 35 countries and five continents, travel became the terrain where many of these questions first surfaced.

Africa 2027 is the newest and most expansive expression of The Geography of Connection, the larger body of work Tracy created to follow these questions wherever they appear.