The Tracy Renee Jones Project

My name is Tracy Renee Jones and I am a writer, poet and visual artist originally from Jersey City, New Jersey. I've been blogging for the past five years about my life as a reunited adoptee after having found my birth family Fall of 2008. I've been writing almost my entire life.  

Since 2008, my writing has turned into a fusion of words, poetry, images and essays that I share online via my own site, The Trippie Hippie, and on several blogs on which I publish regularly.

I wish I could say that I came from the type of foster home that had parents that were supportive and genuine, but I can't. I'm still coming to understand the type of dysfunction I was raised around, though I do not fault the people who contributed to my growth and support during childhood. The experience has left me with much work to do as I try to put myself back together. 

The foster family in which I was raised was headed by a complicated matriarch who both loved and resented my presence in her life. My foster father was an amazing man, who worked very hard and loved me as a father should.

But once he died, things changed.

As a single teen mother, I've been homeless off and on since ageing out of foster care more times than I can remember. What I experienced is something quite routine in the lives of foster children though not often discussed. 

Optimism and determination pushed me to strive for greater things during those times when I wanted to step in front of a moving vehicle and end the pain, once and for all.  

While experiencing homelessness, joblessness, and a basic lack of support from peers and society, I could have easily turned down a more self destructive road than what I did. Not wanting to leave my child in the same situation as I was kept me going. I did what I could do to keep us together as a family. I stumbled through turmoil to create an existence for her.

My life has never been standard, I have recorded nearly all of it in journals that I wish to make into a memoir book. I use photographs, words, and visual art to tell a multimedia version of my story. My drawings have have been commissioned by art galleries, and my words and images published in digital magazines several times.

My story includes being a rape survivor, life as a foster child, and my becoming a teen mother who had to do plenty of moral and legal gymnastics in order to fiscally survive.

I've lived an adventure that I would love to share as a story of inspiration and insight to urban women of color and the challenges they may face.

I pull no punches, and am not ashamed to tell my story with honesty and in full detail.

I am a graduate of New Jersey City University with a degree in Political Science, my matriculation only enhanced my interest in the science of people, and the manner in which cause and effect motivates humans to do as they do.

I'm hoping to bring my story to an audience through audio, visual and writing. I have art in storage, unfinished parts to my memoir and plenty of inspiration for an amazing memoir.

I will use the money donated to acquire basic equipment. I'm in need of a documentary quality digital camera, a better laptop and video editing software. 

If you've gotten this far, then I greatly admire your attention span, but all jokes aside, I appreciate each and every one who takes the time to allow me into their life via social media though my words and images. 

Give a dollar if you can.
Give a tweet, or a Facebook share.

Whatever it is that you do know that with each action you are giving  an inconspicuous child of chance the opportunity to tell her story.

For that I truely, truely do appreciate you.