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Danticat, Edwidge (b. January 19, 1969, Port-au-Prince, Haiti) Novelist and short-story author Edwidge Danticat is one of the major figures among the younger generation of African American writers. Her first two books, the novel Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) and the short-story collection Krik? Krak! (1995) caused major ripples in the literary world. The buzz surrounding Danticat was due not only to her relatively young age but also her extraordinary skill in depicting life in Haiti, despite the fact that she emigrated to the United States from the island nation (controlled at the time by dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier) when she was four years old.^* Danticat’s fiction consists of deeply lyrical, semiautobiographical journeys into the ambivalence of the immigrant, particularly her desires for a homeland that is ever changing, albeit not always in positive ways. To be more specific, Danticat is interested in the position the immigrant holds between the new and old lands and what that “in-between space,” which is “between history and memory, the vernacular and the official, fiction and fact,” means as her characters shape their identities.^*

Breath, Eyes, Memory, which was originally Danticat’s master of fine arts thesis at Brown University, is the story of narrator Sophie Caco, a young Haitian girl who finds herself trying to establish a place for herself in a family of strong-willed women who believe deeply in familial, religious, sexual, and cultural traditions. Sophie’s chastity and sexuality are tightly controlled in much the same way that Haiti is itself under strict control and the threat of terror by its dictatorship. When Sophie joins her estranged mother Martine in New York, she has to reestablish her relationship with her even as she serves as a conduit between her mother and their homeland and attempts to adjust to a very different, often traumatic life in the United States. Danticat explores her themes of the immigrant’s strange status as well as the alternating benefits (storytelling, language, familial bonds) and problems (abuse, humiliation, repression) of passing on certain traditions from generation to generation among a family’s women.

The ten stories of Krik? Krak! revolve around life in Haiti under the Duvalier regime. To the extent that their lives are almost completely circumscribed by Duvalier’s security forces, the protagonists of each of the stories find or imagine ways to escape physically and mentally from official as well as internal repressions. Krik? Krak! received extensive praise upon initial publication; it made many publications’ “best of” lists, and received the Pushcart Prize in 1995 and a nomination for the National Book Award that same year. It also won awards from The Caribbean Writer, Seventeen, and Essence magazines. The Farming of Bones (1998) is a historical novel recounting, in part, the 1937 massacre of 15,000–18,000 Haitian laborers at the orders of Dominican Republic dictator General Rafael Trujillo Molina. At its heart, though, the novel is also an account of the history of race and class relations in Haiti from its very origins. The protagonist and narrator, Amabelle, finds herself and her children persecuted, scarred, or killed along with virtually all other Haitians in the country in the genocidal purge, which had as much to do with racial and cultural distinctions as political ones. As with so many other contemporary African American novels, The Farming of Bones is about recovering lost episodes in history or, to be more accurate, episodes that the residents of the country—to say nothing of the rest of the world—would like to forget. Danticat is also the editor of two collections: The Beacon Best of 2000: Great Writing by Women and Men of All Colors and Cultures (2000); and The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora [sic] (2001).

Interest in Danticat, scholarly and otherwise, has been especially impressive in view of her relatively short career. Her stories are collected in Elaine Campbell and Pierrette Frickey, eds., The Whistling Bird: Women Writers of the Caribbean (1998); Daniel Halpern, ed., The Art of the Story: An International Anthology of Contemporary Short Stories (1999); Rosemarie Robotham, ed., The Bluelight Corner: Black Women Writing on Passion, Sex, and Romantic Love (1999); Kevin Young, ed., Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers (2000); and Kevin Powell, ed., Step into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature, as well as many major anthologies designed for college curricula. She is profiled in Jonathan Bing, ed., Writing for Your Life #4 (2000); and Harold Bloom, ed., Caribbean Women Writers (1997). Danticat’s work is also studied in Adele S. Newson and Linda Strong-Leek, Winds of Change: The Transforming Voices of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars (1998).

Delany, Samuel R. (b. 1942, Harlem, New York City) Samuel R. Delany is one of the most celebrated, prodigious, and prolific science- (or speculative-) fiction authors in history, one of very few successful and well-known African American writers of the genre, and the first to garner significant exposure, acclaim, and impressive sales. Of this small group, only Octavia Butler has rivaled Delany in terms of fame and praise. A former child prodigy (he began writing at a young age and published his first novel when he was only twenty years old), Delany has won the science-fiction industry’s most coveted awards, including the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Pilgrim Award for excellence in science fiction criticism (1985), as well as the Bill Whitehead Memorial Award for Lifetime Excellence in Gay and Lesbian Literature (1993). Delany is often classified with science fiction’s “New Wave” of the 1960s, although he disputes that notion, generally resisting such categorizations but also arguing that he is closer to such authors as Harlan Ellison and Theodore Sturgeon. He is also an accomplished poet, lecturer, gay rights and AIDS activist, and perceptive social critic.

Between 1962 and 2000, Delany published twenty-six books of fiction. This list comprises nineteen novels, three short story collections (Driftglass, 1971; Distant Stars, 1981; Driftglass/Starshards, 1993); a book consisting of three novellas (Atlantis: Three Tales, 1995); and two graphic novels (extended comic books), Empire (1980, illustrated by Howard Chaykin) and Bread and Wine (1999, illustrated by Mia Wolff). Delany’s last novel, Hogg, was published in 1995; from that point until the end of the millennium, he concentrated on nonfiction, specifically social and literary criticism. The only books of fiction that emerged in the latter half of the 1990s were reprints from Delany’s later period (1970 to the present). One hastens to add, however, that although Delany is best known for his fiction, he has earned extensive acclaim as a perceptive, incisive, and lyrical critic. This is due, in part, to Delany’s wise refusal to recognize the artificial line dividing literature and criticism. Even 1984, a collection of letters from late 1983 through early 1985, artfully combines both of these intellectual projects into a memoir that owes as much to epistolary fiction as it does to William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1952). He has also written criticism under the noms de plume K. Leslie Steiner and S. L. Kermit, who also appear as scholars contributing essays and other intellectual material in his books; Tales of Nevèrÿon contains a fine example of the pseudonyms’ role.

Delany’s fiction, most notably his work from the early 1970s forward, is remarkable for its insistence upon maintaining all of the author’s personal and intellectual identities—male, African American, gay, intellectual, science-fiction writer, literature professor—at once while telling extraordinarily complex, multilayered, and utterly gripping stories. In his Return to Nevèrÿon series (1979–1987), for example, Delany often prefaces individual chapters with complex epigraphs from such philosophers, literary critics, historians, and psychologists as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Roland Barthe, Jacques Derrida, Rodolphe Gasché, Edward Said, Jane Jacobs, Marguerite Yourcenar, Shoshana Feldman, Fernard Braudel, and many others; these same chapters respond to or illustrate some or all of the abstract ideas found within the epigraphs. Many of his characters have been known to launch into extended monologues and conversations on art, metaphysics, politics, sexuality, and gender identity without distracting significantly from the narrative. Delany has also experimented with narrative forms and pushed the science-fiction genre past its normal limits. His 1975 novel Dhalgren best illustrates all of Delany’s skills and most of his themes. It may safely be considered his magnum opus. As fellow science fiction writer William Gibson writes in his foreword to the 1996 reprinting, Dhalgren is a highly experimental novel that fits in well with the types of literary experiments now associated with postmodernism, surfiction, or the “New Fiction” of the 1960s. As is true of so many works associated with this movement, Dhalgren repeatedly defers and denies the reader’s normal expectations regarding narrative structure and voice, chronological order, and realism or the nature of the real. It is the tale of a young man named the Kid, a poet, romantic, and gang leader who lives in the fictional city of Bellona, whose own reality, in fact, is completely disrupted by civil disturbances, manmade catastrophes, and environmental disasters. In the simplest terms, Dhalgren may be described as a product of and metaphor for the social and civil conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s, but it would be better to say that it beggars description altogether as it interrogates such commonly accepted dichotomies as sanity/insanity, truth/fiction, literature/ scholarship, gay/straight, male/female, and so on. 1977’s Triton (also published as Trouble on Triton) follows in Dhalgren’s conceptual and artistic footsteps, albeit with a greater emphasis on sex and sexuality.

The Return to Nevèrÿon series is, after Dhalgren and Triton, Delany’s most complex and accomplished body of work. It comprises four books—Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979), Neveryóna (1983), Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985), and Return to Nevèrÿon, or The Bridge of Lost Desire (1987) (which is part of the series, but also may stand alone)—the Return to Nevèrÿon saga is a swords-and-sorcery fantasy set in an ancient, prehistorical, and preliterate society that plays with constructions of sexuality and gender. The series asks how humankind went from barter systems to cash economies, which might be read as an allegory regarding the eventual rise of capitalism. In the third volume, Delany produced what may rightfully be called the first AIDS novel ever published. Its “The Tale of Plague and Carnivals” section is the novel’s most explicit attempt to allegorize the AIDS crisis that was rapidly decimating gay communities in American cities in 1984 and 1985 (a period and phenomenon chronicled in 1984).

Delany’s other post-1970 novels include Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984), which continues the artistic experimentation begun in Dhalgren and Triton, and They Fly at Çiron (1995). Although Delany is best known for science fiction, he has also dived into other genres, including erotica or pornographic fiction (Tides of Lust, 1973; The Mad Man, 1995 [revised 1996]; Hogg, 1995; Bread and Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York, 1999); quasi-autobiographical fantasy (Atlantis: Three Tales, 1995;), and several memoirs (Heavenly Breakfast, 1978; Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, 1999). As with Delany’s criticism, his memoirs are practically as good as his fiction and contain many of the same elements—extreme eloquence and intelligence, strong narrative devices, frank language—as his fiction; they should not be ignored.

Scholars have studied Delany’s fiction and criticism extensively in both article and book form, with Delany standing as one of his own best critics. To date, twelve books and eight dissertations have been written on Delany’s fiction; of those, six books and six dissertations have been devoted to Delany alone, while the rest discuss him vis-à-vis other authors. Students of Delany’s fiction are encouraged to begin with The Review of Contemporary Fiction’s fall 1996 issue (vol. 16, no. 3), the latter half of which is dedicated to Delany’s fiction. From that issue, James Sallis, “Samuel R. Delany: An Introduction,” Robert Elliot Fox, “‘This You-shaped Hole of Insight and Fire’: Meditations on Dhalgren,” and Marc Laidlaw,“Dhalgren: The City Not Yet Fallen, the Novel Still Unread” (a meditation on the power of Delany’s masterwork for readers who have never actually read it, including the article’s author), are three standouts that help to demystify Delany’s oeuvre. Later that year, Sallis edited select essays from that issue as Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany for the University of Mississippi Press. The contributing Delany scholars include Robert Elliot Fox, Jean Mark Gawron, David N. Samuelson, Ray Davis, and Kathleen L. Spencer. The critical outlooks vary widely, but this adds to the collection’s riches. Michael W. Peplow and Robert Bravard, Samuel R. Delany: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography, 1962–1979 (1980), despite its being woefully outdated, is valuable because Peplow and Bravard both worked with Delany to assemble the book (Bravard is one of Delany’ close friends and correspondents). Robert Elliot Fox, Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany (1987) places Delany’s work in conversation with that of two other major authors of challenging, fantastic African American fiction, and it is judiciously informed by Fox’s knowledge of black science fiction.

Of Delany’s own books on his work, the aforementioned 1984 is indispensable, as are The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (1977), The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction (1978), The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957–1965 (1988, rev. 1993), and Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics (1994). True to form, each of these critical works combines sophisticated readings of contemporary literary theory with Delany’s reflections on the ways critics have received his works and the makeup of his audience along ideological, political, sexual, racial, and gender lines. Delany is, in the end, arguably his own best critic.

Demby, William (b. December 25, 1922, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) Poet, journalist, and novelist William Demby is best known for his poetry and a handful of novels published while in self-imposed exile in Rome from 1947 to the end of the millennium, although Demby spent substantial stretches of time in the United States for employment purposes. His early novels, Beetlecreek (1950) and The Catacombs (1965) are considered inventive minor classics. Love Story Black (1978) is a satirical novel narrated by Professor Edwards, an author who is virtually identical to Demby himself. Edwards begins working on a biography of eighty-year-old entertainer and virgin Mona Pariss with the aid of a paramour, scholar Hortense Schiller (cf. African American critic Hortense Spiller). Edwards’s chronicling of Pariss’s life eventually teaches him about the true nature of love.

Due to his long exile and irregular record with publishers (Love Story Black was published by Ishmael Reed’s Reed Publishing Company, which limited its audience), Demby’s books remain out of print, which has led in turn to virtually no extensive critical attention. Only one major article on Demby’s work, Joseph C. Connelly, “William Demby’s Fiction: The Pursuit of Muse,” NALF 10, no. 3 (Autumn 1976), has been published in the last thirty years, and it is too early for Love Story Black to be included.

De Veaux, Alexis (b. September 24, 1948, New York City) Poet, playwright, fiction writer, essayist, editor, and educator Alexis De Veaux is best known as an author of many books of juvenile fiction, placing her in the company of such other African American writers in this genre as Virginia Hamilton, Rosa Guy, Jess Mowry, and Walter Dean Myers. An editor at Essence magazine from 1978 to 1990, De Veaux was also instrumental in gaining exposure for many younger or newer writers emerging in that period. She has been especially important for encouraging and supporting lesbian writers of color.

De Veaux’s two major fictional contributions are Na-Ni (1973), Spirits in the Street (1973), and An Enchanted Hair Tale (1987). Na-Ni is an award-winning children’s book about the existence of evil in the world, as young Harlemite Na-Ni tries to make the new bicycle her mother promised her fit into the block of 133 Street where she lives. An Enchanted Hair Tale is the story of young African American Sudan, who learns to take pride in his hair’s uniqueness and beauty. Spirits in the Street, De Veaux’s only novel of adult fiction, is an emotionally charged record of Harlem of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when tensions over many issues, including the Vietnam War, Watergate, Richard Nixon, the imprisonment of Angela Davis, drugs, police brutality, school desegregation, and crime were at their height.

Dickey, Eric Jerome (b. July 7, 1961, Memphis, Tennessee) Similar to such peers as Omar Tyree, Sheneska Jackson, and Benilde Little, Eric Jerome Dickey established himself in the latter half of the 1990s as a writer of popular fiction that benefited from the inroads established by Terry McMillan’s success. Dickey has been extraordinarily prolific, publishing at least one novel every year since 1996, with virtually all of them charting high sales, generating mostly positive reviews, and satisfying a loyal, primarily African American audience. Dickey’s popularity is due not only to his chosen focus on romance and relationships but also to his realistic yet humorous characterizations, settings, and plots. Moreover, Dickey weaves social commentary into his fiction, taking note of intraracial prejudices along class and color lines that often have deleterious effects upon modern African American relationships and family situations. As a result, Dickey has been a consistently bestselling author.

Dickey’s debut, Sister, Sister (1996) is auspicious as an entry into the “Girlfriend” or “Sister Novel” genre (see separate entry) that became immensely popular in the latter half of the 1990s. It concerns the relationship between sisters Valerie and Inda, who slowly discover the infidelities and indiscretions of the men in their lives, eventually becoming friends with the fiancée of Valerie’s boyfriend, Raymond, and sharing their hilarious and damning insights about romance. Friends and Lovers (1997) is set in Los Angeles and concerns two professional African American men, Tyrel and Leonard, and the two women, Debra and Shelby, with whom they become romantically involved. Milk in My Coffee (1998) covers much of the same territory as its predecessor, though Dickey develops his characters and situations in more depth. The novel focuses primarily upon African American engineer Jordan Greene and white artist Kimberly Chavers, who must confront the prejudices of their respective communities as their romance blooms. The tension is heightened as Jordan deals with tragedies within his family and the legacy of racism in his small Tennessee town.

Cheaters (1999) concerns the lives of several buppies (black urban professionals) living in Southern California, especially Stephan, a resolute ladies’ man whose family past makes it difficult to find and keep love. His story is woven with those of Chante, a single, female accountant, and Darnell, a struggling writer whose wife does not support his work. Each is forced to deal with her or his false understandings about the nature of love and fidelity; that is, they require hard work. Liar’s Game (2000) also focuses upon broken relationships and infidelity, but via divorced protagonist Vincent Calvary Browne Jr., his former wife, his child, and his new partner, Dana Ann Smith, the novel focuses as well upon issues of child custody, family structure, violence, police brutality, and intraracial differences, particularly between black Africans and African Americans.

Dixon, Melvin (b. 1950, Stamford, Connecticut; d. 1992, New York City) Until his death of AIDS-related complications in 1992, Melvin Dixon was a prominent young poet, novelist, critic, and activist. His first novel, Trouble the Water (1989), is the story of Jordan Henry, a successful history professor at a northern college who returns to the South after his grandmother’s death to sort out the family’s legacy. Haunted by his grandmother’s dreams for him to avenge his mother’s death in childbirth by killing his father, Jordan is forced to confront his family’s entire complex past, which is symbolized through travel metaphors, African Diasporic folklore, and references to the blues. Dixon’s second novel, Vanishing Rooms (1991), made a significant impact not only in African American literary circles but also in gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered communities for its frank and occasionally graphic depiction of the horrific prejudices, discrimination, and violence—both physical and psychological—that black gay men often endure. It comprises several intertwined plots centered upon the murder of a gay white man, Metro, by a gang of homophobic thugs. Metro’s black lover, dancer Jesse Duran, seeks answers regarding Metro’s murder and past via Ruella, a black woman he befriends, and Lonny, a young man who helped murder Metro. Dixon’s descriptions of Metro’s past, especially his rape in prison, are sometimes graphic, but the novel is ultimately a devastating indictment of society’s ignorance and hatred of gay men.

Dixon also authored an excellent book of literary criticism, Ride Out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in African American Literature (1987). Vanishing Rooms received an extensive critical treatment in Vivian May’s essay “Reading Melvin Dixon’s Vanishing Rooms: Experiencing ‘The Ordinary Rope that Can Change in a Second to a Lyncher’s Noose or a Rescue Line,’” Callaloo 23, no. 1 (Winter 2000).

Dove, Rita (b. August 28, 1952, Akron, Ohio) Poet and novelist Rita Dove is one of African American literature’s brightest stars of the 1980s and 1990s as a result of her outstanding, complex poetry, which earned her the distinction of being named the seventh poet laureate (formerly consultant in poetry) of the United States by Congress for 1993 through 1995, the first African American to serve in that capacity and the youngest person to date. This led in turn to Dove being named a special consultant in poetry by the Congress from 1999–2000.Her many awards include: Fulbright Scholar at Universität Tübingen, 1974–1975; the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1987 (for Thomas and Beulah); Ohio Arts Council Grant, 1979; Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), 1978 and 1989; Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, 1983–1984; the Callaloo Award, 1986; Lavan Younger Poet Award from the American Academy of Poets, 1986; General Electric Foundation Award, 1987; Ohio Governor’s Award, 1988; Bellagio Residency at the Rockefeller Foundation, 1989; Mellon Fellowship at the National Humanities Center, 1988–1989; Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies, 1989–1992); Phi Beta Kappa Poet, 1993; the NAACP Great American Artist Award, 1993; Renaissance Forum Award, Folger Shakespeare Library, 1994; Duke Ellington Lifetime Achievement Award, 2001.

As a poet, Dove is best known for her technical discipline, mastery of poetic traditions, and fluidity. Her productivity in fiction has not been nearly as prolific as her poetic accomplishments (eight books since 1980), but it has generated very respectable attention and reviews. In 1985, eight of Dove’s short stories were collected and published as Fifth Sunday: Stories, the inaugural number of the Callaloo Fiction series. The stories’ subjects are varied, but each is an invariably complex musing on African American lives in a number of settings, including churches, weddings, and street scenes involving unorthodox characters. Her first novel, Through the Ivory Gate (1992), is a semiautobiographical Künstler-roman about a young black artist, Virginia King, who returns to Akron, Ohio, to teach young children about the value of art and creativity as she delves into and overcomes the pain of memories nestled in her childhood and adolescence. The novel received solid reviews, although some found it rather conservative in its plotting and characterizations.

To date, the only study of Dove’s fiction beyond book reviews and interviews is Malin Pereira’s essay, “‘When the pear blossoms / cast their pale faces on /t he darker side of the earth’: Miscegenation, the Primal Scene, and the Incest Motif in Rita Dove’s Work,” in AAR 36, no. 2 (Summer 2002). Pereira’s interview with Dove in Contemporary Literature 40, no. 2 (Summer 1999) also discusses Through the Ivory Gate. Notable appreciations and profiles of Dove’s career include: Judith Pierce Rosenberg, “Rita Dove,” in Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women 9, no. 2 (Winter 1993); “Dove, Rita” in Current Biography 55, no. 5 (May 1994); and Helen Vendler, “Rita Dove: Identity Markers,” in Callaloo 17, no. 2 (Spring 1994). Interviews with Dove are collected in Earl G. Ingersol, ed., Conversations with Rita Dove (2003), part of Greenwood Press’s Literary Conversations series.

Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, Harvard University The Du Bois institute was founded in 1975 and named after legendary scholar W. E. B. Du Bois, the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University. The program of the Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research comprises numerous missions and functions: it offers ten to fifteen fellowships annually to promising and established scholars in all areas within the larger field of African and African American Studies; it houses and supports the W. E. B. Du Bois Society, which invites secondary-school students to the institute to study with its faculty; from 1991 until 2003, it housed the second major iteration of the journal Transition (see separate entry); the institute acts as a site for many different programs, including AIDS initiatives, a slave-trade database, working groups, National Endowment for the Humanities seminars, art projects and databases, and so on. The crux of the institute, however, is its fellowship program.

While many of the scholars awarded the fellowships study African American fiction, the institute’s name has become nearly synonymous with stellar scholarship in African American literary studies, due largely to the reputation of its current director, Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the most notable scholars of the field in recent years. Although the institute had done well for the first eighteen years of its existence, it came into considerable fame in 1991 after Gates, previously of Duke University, accepted the director position and began luring a “dream team” of key scholars to Harvard. These included philosophers Cornel West and K. Anthony Appiah, sociologist William Julius Wilson (long associated with the University of Chicago), legal scholar Lani Guinier, Orlando Patterson, Evelyn Higginbotham, Lawrence Bobo, Kimberly Dawson, and many others.

Due, Tananarive (b. 1966, Miami, Florida) Journalist and novelist Tananarive Due, the daughter of Civil Rights activists, is one of the most artistically successful members of the Post-Soul generation, concerned as she is with the problems facing African Americans who are the heirs of the Civil Rights era’s legacy. Her work plumbs many formative experiences in the lives of African Americans of that generation, thereby showing how many different moments and trials contribute to the complex psyches and worldviews of her subjects. She also stands as one of the few African American novelists, contemporary or otherwise, to write successful and critically acclaimed science or speculative fiction.

Due’s first novel, The Between (1995), blends African and African American folklore, horror, suspense, and fantasy to portray the struggle for personal identity and meaning in the lives of African Americans living in south Florida. It tells the story of Hilton James, a middle-class social worker whose life is disrupted after his wife, the first African American judge in Miami, receives death threats after she convicts a racist. Hilton begins to have horrific dreams that he is living in different realities and experiencing fates in which he may or may not die. The mystical world portrayed therein is truly frightening, as is the deterioration of James’s personal life as the dreams begin to take their toll. The novel’s slow deconstruction of reality, especially Hilton’s, poses a number of provocative ontological questions about the individual’s place in the world and the very nature of that world itself. Both The Between and My Soul to Keep (1997) were nominated for the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Awards.

Due’s next significant publication was a portion of a serialized detective novel, Naked Came the Manatee (1997), which first appeared in the Miami Herald in late 1995. Due is one of thirteen South Florida authors to write a chapter of the novel, an often comical look at Miami’s cultural scene. My Soul to Keep, Due’s next true novel, blends magical realism, horror, and fantasy to tell of Jessica Jacobs-Wolde, the wife of David Wolde, a 450-year-old African American immortal born in Abyssinia (in present-day Ethiopia). David, whose real name is Dawit, has lived through slavery in America, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and into the present as a jazz musician. He is also part of a secret brotherhood of immortals who try to avoid becoming too deeply involved in the mortal world for fear of the emotional pain of outliving loved ones. As David’s choices threaten to expose the immortals’ secret, they resort to various unscrupulous methods, including murder, to stop him. David then tries to make his wife and daughter immortals to preserve his life with them. The novel’s depiction of the relationship between Jessica, David, and their daughter shows as much about the nature of love as it does about the course of African and African American history over four centuries, including its many horrors. The Living Blood (2001), the sequel to My Soul to Keep, continues with Jessica giving birth to her and David’s daughter, Fana, who manifests magical powers owing to the dual heritage she shares between a mortal and an immortal. As others learn of the magic contained within her blood, Fana becomes a conduit of both good and evil in a plot that lurches magnificently among science fiction, adventure, thriller, mystery, magical realism, and several other genres. Both My Soul to Keep and The Living Blood, which were tremendously successful critically and commercially, earned Due comparisons to another popular horror writer, Stephen King, and numerous awards, including the aforementioned Bram Stoker Awards, an American Book Award (2002), and a nomination for the NAACP Image Award.

The Black Rose (2000) is a historical novel that fictionalizes the life of Madam C. J. Walker, who made a fortune creating and manufacturing black hair-care and beauty products, thereby becoming the first black millionaire. The Black Rose came about after Due was selected by the estate of Alex Haley to complete the research he had done on Walker’s life prior to his death. She took Haley’s Roots (1976) as her literary model. In late 2003, Due published her fifth novel, The Good House, a horror tale about Angela Toussaint, who spent time in a mental hospital after her son’s suicide. She moves to the state of Washington to try to put her life together again, but finds herself haunted by the spirits of the past. As in many such tales, Angela must make peace with her past, particularly her maternal grandmother’s practice of and connections to Creole/hoodoo spiritual practices.

Due’s achievements as an author have brought great commercial success and many mentions in scholarly journals. As heirs of Octavia Butler, both Due and her peer Nalo Hopkinson are certain to attract scholarly studies as well.

Durham, David Anthony (b. March 23, 1969, New York City) Novelist David Anthony Durham is a prominent member of the new class of writers born in the late 1960s and early 1970s that comprises such authors as Mat Johnson, Victor LaValle, Danzy Senna, Daniel Wideman, and Paul Beatty. Each of these brings fresh perspectives on African American culture and history informed by their own experiences of post–Civil Rights America. Durham’s early works of fiction were completed while he was still an undergraduate at the University of Maryland at Baltimore. They were strong enough to earn the Dolphin Moon Press and Malcolm C. Braly Fiction Prizes in 1991, as well as a Hurston/Wright Foundation Award for Fiction in 1992. Durham’s three published books are exquisitely written historical novels that break new ground in terms of their focus upon neglected periods and groups within the larger African American diaspora.

Durham’s debut novel, Gabriel’s Story (2001), resembles a classic Western. Its protagonist, Gabriel Lynch, moves with his family from post–Civil War Baltimore to the plains of Kansas, where the promise of the frontier still beckons. The difference between Gabriel’s family and thousands of other Americans who moved to the West is their heritage; they are African Americans hoping to escape racism in a land that seems truly free. They are part of the black population of the West—approximately a quarter of the whole at its height—that made that region’s wealth possible. Kansas does not quite live up to its promise, however, and Gabriel soon grows tired of the hardships of the plains. He and a friend join a gang of apparent adventurers who turn out to be rustlers, thieves, rapists, and murderers. In eloquent, evocative prose, Durham traces Gabriel’s journey towards maturity and strength as he struggles to free himself of the horrible gang. Along the way, Gabriel and Durham document a West that is at once starkly beautiful and tragic. The narrative thereby simultaneously embodies and defies the traditional Western’s form and content. Gabriel’s Story not only received extensive praise upon its publication but also earned the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for debut fiction in 2002.

A Walk Through Darkness (2002), Durham’s second novel, tells two parallel stories. The first is of William, a slave who escapes on a quest to find his pregnant wife, Dover, after their mistress takes her away from the plantation. Pursuing William is the bounty hunter Morrison, a Scottish immigrant and the subject of the second story. Both are seeking freedom in their journeys and adventures; both find all the complexities and horrors of antebellum America in their paths.

Pride of Carthage: A Novel of Hannibal (2005) breaks ground as one of the first historical novels recounting the adventures of the legendary Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca, whose northern African forces rivaled those of Rome in the second Punic War. In African American communities, Hannibal has long been cited as a hero due to his African birth and heritage. Durham’s elaborate research into Hannibal’s life and his lush prose produce a powerful war novel that helps set to rest many misconceptions about Hannibal’s significance to history and establishes him as a true genius, military and otherwise.

* “Two Blacks Named Among America’s Most Promising Young Novelists,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 12 (Summer 1996): 111.

* Kelli Lyon Johnson, “Both Sides of the Massacre: Collective Memory and Narrative on Hispaniola,” Mosaic 36, no. 2 (June 2003): 76.