Neely Tucker

He is the author of Love in the Driest Season, an autobiographical story that chronicles his journey from his education at a whites-only school in Mississippi, his marriage to a Jamaican, and his adoption of a Zimbabwean child.

[1] A former journalist at The Washington Post, he previously worked as a foreign correspondent in Zimbabwe, where he and his wife, Vita lived, eventually adopting a child.

[4][5] He started first grade at SA on the day it opened and graduated in 1982, playing football, writing for the school's newspaper, and earning the title Mister Starkville Academy.

[8] In 2018, he returned to Starkville Academy and delivered a speech on racism, in which he drew an analogy between white students such as himself and monsters, and compared the Mississippi of the mid twentieth-century with the apartheid rule in South Africa.

[8] Tucker was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for "Life After Death," a story about his wife's seven-year odyssey to help convict her daughter's killer.