Tucker, Neely 1963-

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TUCKER, Neely 1963-

PERSONAL: Born November 26, 1963, in Lexington, MS; son of Duane (a county agent) and Elizabeth; married Vita Gasaway, 1994; children: Chipo (daughter). Education: Attended Mississippi State University; University of Mississippi, degree, 1986.

ADDRESSES: Home—Washington, DC. Agent—c/o Washington Post, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071.

CAREER: Former journalist for Oxford Eagle; Miami Herald, Miami, FL, former journalist; Detroit Free Press, Detroit, MI, former foreign correspondent; Washington Post, Washington, DC, staff writer, 2000–.

WRITINGS:

Love in the Driest Season: A Family Memoir, Crown Publishers (New York, NY), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: Journalist Neely Tucker spent much of his career as a foreign correspondent traveling the globe and covering stories of war and violence. In 1997 he was sent on assignment to Zimbabwe for the Detroit Free Press, and after settling into the country's capital, Tucker and his wife began to learn of the plight of millions of Zimbabwean children who were orphaned by the AIDS epidemic. It was during a visit to a local orphanage that the couple met little Chipo, a day-old infant who had been left to die in a field and who was now struggling for life. The Tuckers fell in love with the little girl and took her home as a foster child. Over the next few months, Chipo began to thrive under the continued care of the Tuckers, and the couple began an earnest quest to formally adopt her. The adoption process became an intense struggle against a bureaucracy fraught with political and economic crises. In his debut book, Love in the Driest Season: A Family Memoir, Tucker recounts the story of Chipo's adoption, framing his family's experiences with memories of his own poverty-stricken childhood in Mississippi and narratives of the political unrest in Zimbabwe and greater Africa.

In an online interview with Alden Mudge for Bookpage, Tucker shied away from calling the memoir "an adoption book or a book about Africa," instead describing the overall theme as "a time in your life when you put everything on the table, when you just risk everything." Mudge himself found Tucker's story "completely absorbing," commenting: "Good writer that he is, Tucker also tells a story of larger and deeper human transformations." Tucker also shared another motivation for penning the memoir: to record the story of his daughter's early years as a gift to her.

Penny Stevens, writing in School Library Journal, called Love in the Driest Season a "riveting account," remarking that "teens are sure to be fascinated by the Tuckers' experience." "Knowing how the story ends does not diminish the intensity and drama of Neely Tucker's story," wrote Jackie Jones in Black Issues Book Review; "the story moves swiftly and maintains its underlying tension until the satisfying conclusion." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly considered Love in the Driest Season "a gorgeous mix of family memoir and reportage that traverses the big issues of politics, racism and war."