About Neely Tucker
Neely Tucker is a staff writer in the Style section of the Washington Post, the author of an acclaimed memoir and a character in an Elmore Leonard novel.
Tucker, 41, grew up in rural Mississippi. His first job in journalism was the Yalobusha county correspondent for the Oxford Eagle, one of the smallest dailies in the United States. He has since reported from more than a dozen states and 50 countries or territories on four continents.
As a foreign correspondent from 1993-2000, based in Europe and Africa, he crossed the foothills of the Alps with a pair of Romanian clandestines, covered the war in Bosnia, post-genocide Rwanda, and conflicts from Iraq to southern Lebanon to Congo and Sierra Leone. Leonard, the crime novelist, read these dispatches and used him as the basis and namesake for a foreign correspondent in the 1999 novel, Cuba Libre.
In real life, Tucker married the girl next door in Detroit, Vita Griffin, an interracial marriage that surprised both families. While based in Zimbabwe, Tucker was among the foreign press corps dubbed as "enemies of the state" by dictatorial President Robert Mugabe. The Tuckers fought for nearly two years to adopt Chipo, a terribly ill infant who had been abandoned at birth, getting out of the country before all foreign reporters were expelled.
He explored the issues of race, family, war and heartbreak in 2004's Love in the Driest Season. The book was named one of best books of the year by Publishers Weekly, the American Booksellers Association, the New York City Public Library and the Christian Science Monitor. It was named the "Inspirational Memoir of the Year" by the Books for a Better Life Foundation. It won awards from the Christopher Foundation, Borders, Barnes and Noble, Reader's Digest, Elle Magazine, Bookbrowse.com and many others. It has been published in Great Britain, Germany and Australia. It is being developed for film in Los Angeles.
Neely Tucker was born in Lexington, Mississippi in 1963, one of the poorest places in America. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Mississippi in 1986.
Vita Tucker does relief work for the charity World Vision, where she specializes in HIV-AIDS issues in developing countries. They live with Chipo in Washington, D.C.
