Tananarive Due
Tananarive Priscilla Due is an American author and educator. Due won the American Book Award for her novel The Living Blood, and the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel, the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel, and the World Fantasy Award for her novel The Reformatory. She is also known as a film historian with expertise in Black horror. Due teaches a course at UCLA called "The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival and the Black Horror Aesthetic", which focuses on the Jordan Peele film Get Out.
Early life and education
Due was born in Tallahassee, Florida, the oldest of three daughters of civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due and civil rights lawyer John D. Due Jr. Her mother named her after the French name for Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar.Due earned a B.S. in journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and an M.A. in English literature, with an emphasis on Nigerian literature, from the University of Leeds. At Northwestern, she lived in the Communications Residential College.
Career
Due was working as a journalist and columnist for the Miami Herald when she wrote her first novel, The Between, in 1995. This, like many of her subsequent books, was part of the supernatural genre. Due also wrote The Black Rose, a historical novel about Madam C. J. Walker and Freedom in the Family, a nonfiction work about the civil rights struggle. She contributed to the humor novel Naked Came the Manatee, a mystery/thriller parody to which various Miami-area authors each contributed chapters. Due also authored the African Immortals novel series and the Tennyson Hardwick novels.Due is a member of the affiliate faculty in the creative writing MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles and is also an endowed Cosby chair in the humanities at Spelman College in Atlanta.
She developed a course at UCLA called "The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival and the Black Horror Aesthetic" after the release of the 2017 film Get Out. The first course went viral and included a visit from Jordan Peele.
Due was featured in the 2019 documentary film Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, produced by Shudder.
Her novel The Reformatory was published by Saga Press in 2023.
Personal life
Due is the daughter of civil rights activists Patricia Stephens Due and civil rights attorney John D Due Jr.. She has two sisters Johnita and Lydia.Due is married to author Steven Barnes, whom she met in 1997 at a Clark Atlanta University panel on "The African-American Fantastic Imagination: Explorations in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror". The couple lives in the Los Angeles, California area with their son, Jason.
Novels
The Between The Black Rose The Good House Joplin's Ghost Ghost Summer: Stories The Reformatory- ''The Wishing Pool and Other Stories''
''African Immortals'' series
My Soul to Keep The Living Blood Blood Colony- ''My Soul to Take''
The Tennyson Hardwick novels
Casanegra In the Night of the Heat From Cape Town with Love- ''South by Southeast''
Graphic novels
The Keeper- ''Black Panther: Sins of the King''
Other works
Naked Came the Manatee Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights The Ancestors- Devil's Wake
- Domino Falls
- ''The Keeper''
Short stories
- "Like Daughter", [Dark Matter (prose anthologies)|Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora]
- "Patient Zero", The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection
- "Trial Day", Mojo: Conjure Stories with
- "Aftermoon", Dark Matter: Reading the Bones
- "Senora Suerte", The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
- "Enhancement", ''Cellarius Stories, Volume 1''