ABOUT

Tananarive Due

Tananarive Due — pronounced tah-nah-nah-REEVE doo — is the American Book Award-winning author of nine books, ranging from supernatural thrillers to a mystery to a civil rights memoir.

Her newest novel, Blood Colony (June 2008), is the long-awaited sequel to her 2001 thriller The Living Blood  and 1997’s My Soul to Keep, a reader favorite that Stephen King said “bears favorable comparison to Interview with the  Vampire.”  Blood Colony continues the saga of African immortals with healing blood.

Due also collaborates with her husband, novelist and screenwriter Steven Barnes.  They recently sold their screenplay adaptation of her novel The Good House to Fox Searchlight studios.  In the summer of 2007, Due and Barnes published their first mystery, Casanegra: A Tennyson Hardwick Novel, which they wrote in collaboration with actor Blair Underwood.  Publishers Weekly called Casanegra “seamlessly entertaining.”  The series will continue with In the Night of the Heat, scheduled for publication later this year.

The Living Blood, which received a 2002 American Book Award, “should set the standard for supernatural thrillers of the new millennium,”said Publishers Weekly, which named The Living Blood and My Soul to Keep among the best novels of the year. The Good House was nominated as Best Novel by the International Horror Guild. The Black Rose, based on the life of business pioneer Madam C.J. Walker, was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. My Soul to Keep and The Good House are both in film development at Fox Searchlight.  

Due’s novel Joplin’s Ghost blends the supernatural, history and the present-day music scene as a rising R&B singer’s life is changed forever by encounters with the ghost of Ragtime King Scott Joplin.  Due also brought history to life in The Black Rose, a historical novel based on the research of Alex Haley – and Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights, which she co-authored with her mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due. Freedom in the Family was named 2003's Best Civil Rights Memoir by Black Issues Book Review.  (Patricia Stephens Due took part in the nation’s first “Jail-In” in 1960, spending 49 days in jail in Tallahassee, Florida, after a sit-in at a Woolworth lunch counter).

In 2004, alongside such luminaries as Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison, Due received the “New Voice in Literature Award” at the Yari Yari Pamberi conference co-sponsored by New York University’s Institute of African-American Affairs and African Studies Program and the Organization of Women Writers of Africa.

Due has a B.S. in journalism from Northwestern University and an M.A. in English literature from the University of Leeds, England, where she specialized in Nigerian literature as a Rotary Foundation Scholar. Due currently teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles.  Due has also taught at the Hurston-Wright Foundation’s Writers’ Week, the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and the summer Imagination conference at Cleveland State University.  She is a former feature writer and columnist for The Miami Herald.  

Due lives in Southern California with her husband, Steven Barnes; their son, Jason; and her stepdaughter, Nicki.