Historian Tracy J. Prince, Ph.D. is a Research Professor at Portland State University’s American Indian Teacher Program, a Fulbright Specialist (Malta), and the author of 4 books (Notable Women of Portland, Portland’s Slabtown, Portland’s Goose Hollow, and Culture Wars in British Literature). She has spent over two decades teaching in Turkey, Canada, and the United States, with extensive research time in England, Australia, South Africa, and France.
In her books on Oregon history, her research has uncovered forgotten women’s history, Native-American history, and Chinese-American history. At Playa she will be working on her next book, Might Oughta Keep Singin’ –about her family’s legacy of harmonizing in backwoods Arkansas churches and as sharecroppers who sang while picking cotton, of preachers and heathen, of church ladies and drunks, of slaves and slave owners, of the Native people displaced from the land and the pioneers who rolled to the next frontier in covered wagons, and of those for the Civil War and those against it. From these Southern ancestries arose the roots music of America.