Tracy Sanford Tucker

Tracy Sanford Tucker joined the staff of the National Willa Cather Center in 2012 as Education Director; in 2022, she was named Director of Collections and Curation. A certified archivist, Tucker oversees the management of the National Willa Cather Center's museum collections and archives programs, as well as the largest number of nationally-designated historic sites dedicated to an American author. Tucker is a graduate of Kansas State University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with a Master's degree in American Literature with specializations in Creative Writing and Great Plains Studies. She is an Affiliate Fellow of the Center for Great Plains Studies. Her research, essays, and photography have been published in the Willa Cather Review, The New Territory Magazine, Old Northwest Quarterly, Whirlwind, and others. She contributed a chapter on the farm fiction genre to Unknown No More: Recovering Sanora Babb (University of Oklahoma Press, 2021) and an essay on Cather in Taos in Lingering Inland: A Literary Tour of the Midwest (University of Illinois Press, 2025). Tucker is an advocate of suburban rewilding and has, with her family, converted nearly a half-acre of lawn to native ecosystems and heritage fruit and vegetable production. She loves film noir, non-competitive board games, New Mexico chiles and Eastern European tomatoes, and little animals.