Tananarive Due

Tananarive Priscilla Due (/təˈnænəriːv ˈdjuː/ tə-NAN-ə-reev DEW) (born January 5, 1966) is an American author and educator. She is best 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 has also written The Black Rose, historical fiction about Madam C. J. Walker (based in part on research conducted by Alex Haley before his death) and Freedom in the Family, a non-fiction work about the civil rights struggle. 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.

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 Peele.

Due was featured in the 2019 documentary film Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, produced by Shudder.

Personal life

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.

Awards and recognition

• Nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel for The Between
• Nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel for My Soul to Keep
• Nominated for an NAACP Image Award for The Black Rose
• Received the NAACP Image Award for In the Night of the Heat: A Tennyson Hardwick Novel (with Blair Underwood and Steven Barnes)
• The American Book Award for The Living Blood
• 2008 Carl Brandon Kindred Award for the novella "Ghost Summer", which appeared in the anthology The Ancestors (2008)
• Winner of the 2016 British Fantasy Award for the short story collection Ghost Summer.