About Tananarive Due

Tananarive Due is a former Cosby Chair in the Humanities at Spelman College (2012-2014), where she taught screenwriting, creative writing. and journalism. She also teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles. The American Book Award winner and NAACP Image Award recipient is the author of twelve novels and a civil rights memoir. In 2010, she was inducted into the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University.

Due’s novella “Ghost Summer” received the 2008 Kindred Award from the Carl Brandon Society, and her short fiction has appeared in best-of-the-year anthologies of science fiction and fantasy. Due is a leading voice in black speculative fiction; a paper on Due’s work recently was presented at the College Language Association Conference.

Due collaborates on the Tennyson Hardwick mystery series with her husband, author Steven Barnes, in partnership with actor Blair Underwood. Due also wrote The Black Rose—a historical novel about the life of Madam C. J. Walker, 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, the late civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due. Freedom in the Family was named 2003’s Best Civil Rights Memoir by Black Issues Book Review.

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 BS in journalism from Northwestern University and an MA in English literature from the University of Leeds, where she specialized in Nigerian literature as a Rotary Foundation Scholar. Due lives in Southern California with Barnes and their son, Jason. Her writing blog is tananarivedue.wordpress.com. Her website is tananarivedue.com.

Ghost Summer is her first short story collection.