Bennett was born Tracy Pinkham and grew up in Maine.[1][2] Her parents were both in the Navy when her older sister, Cinda, was born, and later divorced.[2] She and her sister attended free schools.[2]
According to her family, Bennett began solving jigsaw puzzles before she could talk.[3] She had an early interest in crossword puzzles.[4] She attended the University of Southern Maine as a theater major, then transferred to the University of Michigan and changed her major to English literature, graduating in 1989.[2]
Career
Bennett worked for twenty years for Mathematical Reviews, first as a copy editor and then as the copy editing department manager.[5][1][6]
In 2010 she won a crossword puzzle contest at The Ann Arbor News and soon after became interested in puzzle construction and attended a conference for crossword puzzle builders.[7] Her first commissioned crossword puzzle was published by Knitty.[3][8] She sold several puzzles in 2013, including her first to The New York Times.[1][6][8] In 2017 she cofounded a website offering crossword puzzles created by women and nonbinary people and began editing crosswords.[1]
Bennett became an associate puzzle editor for The New York Times in 2020.[4][1] In 2022 she became the paper's Wordle editor.[5][4] She also edits the paper's crossword puzzles and creates and edits crosswords for other publications.[4][1]
She made adjustments to Wordle, which was a new acquisition by the Times from its creator, creating a variety of level-of-difficulty throughout a week's puzzles and varying the lexical and semantical types of words from day to day, adding and removing words from the database, limiting the inclusion of words that have too many identical four-letter patterns in common with other words, avoiding words that are spelled differently in other versions of English, and experimenting with a themed entry on Thanksgiving Day.[5][1][9][10][11] She considers the implications of words related to current news and researches possible offensive alternative uses of words.[4][1][10][9] She has received pushback from players about themed entries.[12][1][5]
Bennett began editing Strands, a themed word search game, when the Times launched it in March 2024.[13]
Personal life
Bennett lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she works from home.[5][4] In 2002 she married George Bennett, with whom she has a son.[1][2] She was widowed in 2021.[2]