Ricky Tucker

“My classmates were happy to be there because it feels like a last shot, you know?” Tucker says of his classmates and their time in the Writing & Democracy Honors Program, or W&D. “The stakes are higher for them. Many have children. It’s an opportunity for people who missed that first chance or had several first chances at a traditional liberal arts degree.”

Since 2006, the W&D bachelor’s program has awarded a scholarship to approximately 60 students a year. The scholarship provides them with a special course of study designed specifically for writers interested in the intersections of writing, culture, and politics.

“The Writing & Democracy Honors Program is really about politics and the power of words to push activism—and the power of the writer in the world,” Tucker explains. “It gives you a cohort. It gives you seminars for deep discussion. It gives you a literary magazine that's the oldest at The New School, 12th Street,” of which he served as editor in chief. “It’s been everything to me.”

W&D also gave Ricky a community of fellow innovative writers and artists. He was able to take courses in everything from ball culture—a life-changing class called Vogue’ology, which became a catalyst for his future work—to Queer NYC, a course taught by his academic advisor, which played a pivotal role in shaping his research interests. In his final project for both the Vogue’ology course and another called Old Weird America, Ricky wrote and performed an original folk song inspired in part by the iconic 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning.

“I felt really good about it, and I felt clever, too,” says Tucker. “But that’s The New School. You’ll be in one classroom talking about timely, relevant theories and you'll go to your next class and they’re talking about those ideas in a different context.”

In December 2021, his scholarly work culminated in the launch of his debut book, And the Category Is...: Inside New York’s Vogue, House, and Ballroom Community, a love letter to the legendary Black and Latinx LGBTQ underground subculture based in New York.

“All of my art criticism has something that implicates me,” Tucker says. “It’s personal narrative. It talks about memory and it talks about art and politics, and so there are all of these through lines. Practicing writing in W&D got me to the point where I have a format and a style and I know how to react to art and I know how to make that political.” Today Tucker shares insights like these and others with young writers through his work as an instructor at Eugene Lang College and in the W&D program, in which he teaches an Honors Nonfiction course.