Jackson Tucker (JT) became Part-time Faculty at Montgomery College, where he taught composition, argumentative, creative, and technical writing courses off and on beginning in 2008. He earned a BA in English and Geography (2007) from West Virginia University, followed by an MFA in Creative Writing (2010) from Georgia College, and later an MA in Language, Literacy, and Culture (2025) from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

After completing graduate study, Tucker moved to New York, where he worked as an editor for the American Library Association and Bedford/St. Martin’s–Macmillan Learning. In affiliation with the Open Society Foundations, he trained youth in debate and deliberative democracy skills, both in the United States and abroad in Hungary, Slovakia, and Ireland. He also developed instructional books on these topics and managed the organization’s publishing program. During this period, he secured a United Nations Democracy Fund grant to oversee the translation of debate and public speaking resources, further extending the reach of his educational and rhetorical work.

For his research, Tucker was recognized with several major fellowships. He won the Publicly Engaged Research and Storywork Fellowship from UMBC’s LLC program (2023–2024 academic year), which supported travel to Bogotá, Colombia. He also received an MLA Summer Institute Fellowship for Reading & Writing Pedagogy at Access-Oriented Institutions (June 2024) and a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship to attend the Rustbelt Institute (June 2023) at Ursuline College. In summer 2024, he attended the Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute as part of the Queer Rhetorics group. He had also been selected for the 2025 NEH Summer Institute, Visual Wests, at the University of Oklahoma, but the program was cancelled following the dismantling of the NEH earlier that year.

Tucker’s research explored how queer communities built solidarity and belonging through food, drawing on rhetoric, American studies, decoloniality, critical food studies, and queer theory. He investigated sites of queer resistance and liberation, particularly as they related to community-building strategies and practices of commensality.

Jackson Tucker is now a UNIDEL Distinguished Graduate Fellow at the University of Delaware, where he is pursuing a PhD in English. His current work focuses on the intersections of the rhetorics of care and community with non-human animal rhetorics and decolonial theory.