Tracey Boone Swan

TRACEY BOONE SWAN BY MARTIN CHIPPERFIELD 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 38

Tracey would have approved the cover image. She hearted it on Instagram a few days before she died.

Tracey Boone Swan, co-founding editor of this magazine, died while being treated for cancer in Houston Texas on 26 July 2016, aged 47. I loved her beyond words.

One day in 2007 Tracey said to me how about we do a magazine, and she came up with the name too. At the time we both lived on the 34th parallel, just in different hemispheres, Tracey lived in Orange County, California, and I lived in Adelaide, South Australia.

Tracey played a major part in the design and concept of the magazine, wrote for it, interviewed other editors and writers, and established and promoted the mag in the US lit mag universe.

Tracey was always writing.

“I am a writer,” she said, “because I seek to give voice and to voice the stories that have not been told, that have not been heard. The stories I write, such as My Story Begins with… published in the Louann Atkins Temple Series, Women in Culture Anthology, Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academics and the Austin Project, (The University of Texas Press, July 2010), are about the conversations people have with themselves, the inner dialogues that one has when facing a challenge.”

Tracey’s poetry and fiction has been published in numerous journals including BluePrintReview, apt, All Things Girl, and a few stories and poems in this mag.

She attained an MA from UT Austin and a dual MFA at Chapman University. She was awarded a Fulbright Grant for research in Paris on gender and race in the Parisian jazz age during the inter-war period.

Tracey came to Paris with her son Colin and was laying out a career in teaching.