Tananarive Due

Tananarive Due has written seven books ranging from supernatural thrillers to science fiction novels to a civil rights memoir, making this American Book Award-winning author among the nation’s most versatile voices.

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 both The Living Blood and My Soul to Keep among the best novels of the year. Her 2003 novel, The Good House, was nominated for “Best Novel” by the International Horror Guild. Due brought history to life in The Black Rose, a novel based on the life of pioneer Madam C.J. Walker that was nominated for a NAACP Image Award, and in 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. Her best-selling 2005 novel Joplin’s Ghost blends the supernatural, history and the present-day music scene as a rising R&B singer is changed by encounters with the ghost of Ragtime King Scott Joplin. Her latest novel, My Soul to Take, was published in 2011.

In 2004, Due received the New Voice in Literature Award at a 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’s short story “Patient Zero” is included in two Best-of-the-Year science fiction anthologies for the year 2000: Year’s Best SF 6 and The Year’s Best Science Fiction: 17th Annual Collection. Her work also appears in the Dark Matter anthologies of black science fiction and fantasy. She wrote a chapter in the best-selling novel Naked Came the Manatee, a comic thriller written by 13 writers.

Due has a BS 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 has taught at the Hurston-Wright Foundation’s Writers’ Week at Howard University, the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop at Michigan State University, the University of Miami, and the summer Imagination conference at Cleveland State University. She is a former feature writer and columnist for The Miami Herald.