Winning recipient of our 2024 Terry J. Cox Poetry Award
This is David Tucker’s third collection of poems. His first book, Late for Work, won the Bakeless Poetry Prize, selected by Philip Levine, and was published by Houghton Mifflin. He also won a national chapbook contest held by Slapering Hol Press, for Days When Nothing Happens. He was awarded a Witter Bynner Fellowship by the Library of Congress, selected by Donald Hall. He studied under Robert Hayden at the University of Michigan. Tucker’s poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including Ploughshares, Mississippi Review, North American Review, Lascaux Review, Narrative, Southern Humanities Review, Poetry Friday, Dogwood Poetry Journal, Missouri Review, the Florida Review, the New Verse News, and Oberon. He received a commendation from the Troubadour International Poetry Contest. He was a finalist for the Atlanta Review International Poetry Competition.
A native Tennessean, Tucker has read twice at the Library of Congress and three times on NPR. Ted Kooser selected two of his poems for American Life in Poetry.
A career journalist, he supervised investigations for the Star-Ledger newspaper of New Jersey and edited two Pulitzer Prize winners. He also supervised and edited a two-year long investigation into racial profiling by the New Jersey State Police which received a national news award by the Associated Press. And he edited a George Polk award into rampant steroid use by the New Jersey State Police
