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VJ Books Presents Author Neely Tucker!
 Neely Tucker was born in Holmes County, Mississippi in 1963. A seventh-generation Mississippian, he attended Mississippi State and the University of Mississippi, graduating magna cum laude from the latter, and was named as the University's top journalism student. In college, he started writing for The Oxford Eagle as their "Yalobusha County correspondent."
After college, he worked at Florida Today, Gannett News Service and the Miami Herald, all in a four-year span. He moved on to the Detroit Free Press and was named to run the paper's European Bureau in early 1993. Based in Warsaw, Poland, he datelined from forty-eight countries in forty-eight months. He principally reported on the war in the former Yugoslavia, but also covered violent episodes in Armenia, Israel and the West Bank, Lebanon, Iraq and several former Soviet provinces.
In 1997, he moved to the paper's Africa bureau, based in Zimbabwe. He reported from more than fifteen countries across the continent in three years, including covering civil wars or violent uprisings in Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Uganda, Sierra Leone and Liberia, as well as the U.S. Embassy bombing in Kenya. He was beaten by a mob in Kinshasa and, while covering public executions in Kigali, was saved from another mob beating by Rwandan Army officers.
At home in Zimbabwe, the country was collapsing under the weight of the Mugabe regime and the AIDS epidemic. These war experiences, and the adoption of his gorgeous elder daughter from a state-run orphanage in Harare, provided the basis of "The Driest Season". They also intrigued Elmore Leonard, a friend in Detroit, to use him as the basis and namesake for a foreign correspondent in "Cuba Libre."
Since 2000, he has worked for The Washington Post. He has covered the U.S. District Court in Washington and its appellate division, generally seen as the nation's number two court beneath the U.S. Supreme Court.
He's balanced these rough-hewn assignments over the years with reporting on the arts. He hung out with Bo Diddley at his home in rural Florida and knocked back moonshine with blues legend Buddy Guy at his club in Chicago. In Europe, he wrote about American jazz exiles in Paris such as Steve Lacy and Steve Potts.
"Life After Death," a story about his wife's seven-year odyssey to help convict her daughter's killer, was nominated by the Post for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize.
His wife, Carol, is a native of Manchester Parish, Jamaica. Chipo, his elder daughter, hails from Zimbabwe. They have four-year-old twins, Drew and Paige, who are half Mississippian and half Jamaica..
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Neely Tucker Bibliography
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Love in the Driest Season - 2004
- The Ways of the Dead - 2014
- Murder, D.C. - 2015
- Only the Hunted Run - July 2016
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