Tananarive Due

Tananarive Priscilla Due (born January 5, 1966) is an American author and educator. Due won the American Book Award for her novel The Living Blood, and the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel, the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel, and the World Fantasy Award for her novel The Reformatory (2023). She is also 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 a focus on Nigerian literature, from the University of Leeds. At Northwestern, she lived in the Communications Residential College. This, like many of her subsequent books, was part of the supernatural genre.

Due also wrote The Black Rose, a historical novel about Madam C. J. Walker (based in part on research conducted by Alex Haley before his death), and Freedom in the Family, a nonfiction work co-authored with Patricia Stephens Due about the civil rights movement. She contributed to the humor novel Naked Came the Manatee, a mystery thriller parody to which various Miami-area authors contributed chapters. Due also authored the African Immortals novel series and co-authored the Tennyson Hardwick novels with Blair Underwood and Steven Barnes.

Due was a member of the affiliate faculty in the creative writing MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles and 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 Jordan Peele.

Personal life Due is the daughter of civil rights activists Patricia Stephens Due and civil rights attorney John D. Due Jr. She has two sisters, Johnita and Lydia.

Due is married to author Steven Barnes, whom she met in 1997 at a Clark Atlanta University panel on "The African-American Fantastic Imagination". The couple lives in Los Angeles with their son, Jason.