COLLECTIONS

Dive Deep into Summer Reading

Meet Cynthia Tucker, University of South Alabama’s journalist-in-residence, and get her summer reading recommendations for the curious mind.

text by JILL CLAIR GENTRY • portrait by CHAD RILEY

There’s nothing wrong with a good beach read. Sometimes, entertainment is all we need from a book. But for lifelong learners — those who are always seeking to enlarge their perspectives — a typical summer reading list might not satisfy their endless quest for more knowledge. MB asked Cynthia Tucker, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the University of South Alabama’s journalistin-residence, for a summer reading list for those of us who will never graduate from wanting to know more.

Meet Cynthia Tucker

Born in Monroeville, Alabama, just fi ve years before the publication of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Cynthia Tucker learned the power of words at an early age.

“I became a journalist because I wanted to change the world,” she says.

After an award-winning career as a columnist and editorial page editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Tucker began her second career as a professor at the University of Georgia before moving to Mobile in 2014 to be closer to her mother, who, at 95 years old, still lives in Monroeville. Tucker’s 13-year-old daughter Carly spends time there in the summers, learning her grandmother’s recipes and gardening techniques.

“I didn’t inherit those talents, so we are grateful Carly gets to spend time with her grandmother,” Tucker says.

Tucker’s life has been full of achievement, but at 67, she still has a desire to do more. So far in 2022, she’s received the Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer of the Year and released a book of political essays, “The Southernization of America: A Story of Democracy in the Balance,” with local author Frye Gaillard.

“Writing a book was on my bucket list,” she says. “Now I think I want to write more books. It scratched an itch.”

As both a writer and an educator, reading has been a fundamental element of Tucker’s life, both personally and professionally.

“I’m always talking to my students about reading,” she says. “Read a newspaper, read good books. Growing up in a small town, I was only exposed to the wider world through books. A lot of my students are from the Gulf Coast area and haven’t traveled much, but I know I can introduce them to a wider world. It is rewarding for me to be able to do that for them.”

“Surprised by Joy”by C. S.

Lewis. The late, great Harper Lee lent me a copy of C. S. Lewis’ “Surprised by Joy,” and I never managed to return it. The insights and inspiration it offers have made it worth several readings.

“The Promise of the Pelican”

by Roy Hoffman, an area resident, hits the sweet spot for me because it’s a murder mystery, but it’s also quite well written.