Joan Sampson Tucker was born in the English Midlands of Anglo/Celtic parents. She was educated at St Anne's Boarding School in Birmingham from where she won a scholarship to the Mosely Art School. The advent of World War II prevented her taking up the scholarship and she worked instead as a nanny, swineherd and with the Bank of England where she was involved with the bank's Operatic and Dramatic Society as a scenery painter and set designer.
Subsequently Joan Tucker worked in the Arboretum at the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew, during which time she completed all the illustrations for the Pelican publication Grasses that was selected for inclusion in the National Book League's exhibition of the best designed books for 1954. She then worked in the laboratory at Rothamstead Experimental station, Hertfordshire, where she acquired skills in photography and electron microscopy, skills which led to her appointment as electron microscopist at Oxford in the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology and the Botany's Specimen Preparation Laboratory. A collection of her sketches entitled Pencilled Figments: Drawings was published in 1999.
After her marriage to Dr Richard Tucker in 1959 and the birth of their four children, the family moved to Tasmania. Here her interest in Spoken English led to teaching adult migrant students and writing and publishing educational material. Her text English Pronunciation: A Practical Aid, first published in 1958, has been reprinted six times.
Joan Tucker's poems reflect her rich and varied life and particular interest in language and art. They have been published in national and international journals and in her selected work Under Different Skies. Her poems are carefully crafted imaginative reflections on life and responses to people and the environment. They are marked by accessible language, humour and emotional sensibility. Bruce Dawe describes her poetry as 'perceptive, sympathetic and motivated by an affection and knowledge which never lapses into sentimentality', and praises her 'sharp eye for the particulars of the natural world and a creative joy in the pleasure it offers us'.
