TODAY’S BLACK SPECULATIVE FICTION MONTH SPOTLIGHT IS TANANARIVE DUE!

Tananarive Due

Tananarive Due is an American author and educator born in Tallahassee, Florida. She is the oldest of three daughters of civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due and civil rights lawyer John D. Due Jr. Tananarive was named her after the French name for Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar. She went on to earn a B.S. in journalism from Northwestern University and an M.A. in English literature, with an emphasis on Nigerian literature, from the University of Leeds. While studying at Northwestern, Due lived in the Communications Residential College.

Tananarive serves as the Cosby Chair for the Humanities at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia where she resides. She has written a dozen supernatural suspense novels, including the African Immortals series that began with “My Soul to Keep.”  Tananarive won an American Book Award for her supernatural thriller “The Living Blood”, and along with her husband, science fiction author, Steven Barnes, won an NAACP Image Award for the mystery novel “In the Night of the Heat.” Barnes was co-author of the novel and they both worked in collaboration with actor Blair Underwood.

Due worked as a journalist/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 has also written “The Black Rose”, historical fiction about Madame C. J. Walker (based in part on research conducted by legendary author, Alex Haley (prior to his death) and “Freedom in the Family”, a non-fiction work about the civil rights struggle she co-authored with her mother, Patricia Stephens Due.

She also was one of the contributors to the humor novel, “Naked Came The Manatee”, in which various Miami area authors each contributed chapters to a mystery/thriller parody. Due is also the author of the “African Immortals” novel series and the Tennyson Hardwick novels.

Tananarive is a member of the affiliate faculty in the creative writing MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Speculative fiction novels

• The Between (1995)
• The Good House (2003)
• Joplin’s Ghost (2005)

African Immortals Series

• My Soul to Keep (1997)
• The Living Blood (2001)
• Blood Colony (2008)
• My Soul To Take (2011)

Mysteries

• Naked Came the Manatee (1996) (contributor)

The Tenneyson Hardwick novels

• Casanegra (2007; with Steven Barnes & Blair Underwood)
• In the Night of the Heat (2008; Steven Barnes & Blair Underwood)
• From Cape Town with Love (2010; Steven Barnes & Blair Underwood)
• South by Southeast (2012; Steven Barnes & Blair Underwood)

Short Stories

• “Like Daughter”, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000)
• “Patient Zero”, The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection (2001)
• “Trial Day”, Mojo: Conjure Stories (2003)
• “Afternoon”, Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2004)
• “Senora Suerte”, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (September 2006)

Other works

• The Black Rose, historical fiction featuring Madam C.J. Walker (2000)
• Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights (2003) (with Patricia Stephens Due)

BE SURE TO HELP CELEBRATE BLACK SPECULATIVE FICTION MONTH BY CHECKING OUT THE WORK(S) OF THIS WONDERFUL WRITER & REMEMBER TBIYTC!!!