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A rural Michigan transplant to New York City, Tracie McMillan covers business’s impact on our most vulnerable, specializing in holding the powerful to account.
She is the author of The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America and the New York Times bestseller, The American Way of Eating, which won the Books for a Better Life Award and the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism. A onetime target of Rush Limbaugh, McMillan oversaw national coverage of worker organizing for Capital & Main from August 2023 through December 2025, where her reporters’ work won recognition from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing (SABEW) and helped pressure the Biden administration to rebid a $7bn contract over union busting concerns.
Tracie has received fellowships from the Russell Sage Foundation, MacDowell, and the Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellows at the University of Michigan. Her essays and journalism have been published in the New York Times, Mother Jones, Harper’s, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, National Geographic, and elsewhere. She is a two-time finalist for a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism, a Livingston Award Finalist, and the winner of the Harry Chapin Media Award, the James Aronson Prize for Social Justice Journalism, and a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award. A specialist in the business of American inequality, she has spoken widely about her work for audiences ranging from the Logan Symposium on Investigative Reporting to the Chautauqua Institution, Seattle Town Hall to Texas A&M University.
Previously, Tracie served as a Senior Fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism; the managing editor at City Limits magazine in New York City; and as a member of the James Beard Foundation Media Awards Journalism Committee, where she pushed for broader racial, economic, and geographic diversity in judging panels. Her career began with a Village Voice internship under investigative reporter Wayne Barrett.
The daughter of a lawnmower salesman and an English major, Tracie has supported herself since the age of 19. She grew up on a dirt road and started working at 14, at an orchard, to save for college. A partial scholarship at New York University yielded a well-connected nannying gig; a B.A. in Political Science; and a reporting apprenticeship with investigative reporter Wayne Barrett at the Village Voice. Raised in the exurbs between Flint and Detroit, she reports nationwide but currently splits her time between Brooklyn, NY and Detroit, MI.
She can be found on Instagram, Twitter, Bluesky, and Facebook.
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