Casting A Shadow: Tananarive Due
In this instalment, we explore a wonderful contributor to the world of horror with her speculative fiction works as an author as well as with her role as a film historian with a focus on Black horror.
Tananarive Due was born in Tallahassee, FL. January 5, 1966 to civil rights activists John and Patricia Stephens Due. Her father would go on to become a civil rights attorney while her mother continued her work as an activist. With her parents’ work came challenges, such as racism growing up in a predominantly white neighborhood where she felt unsafe. These experiences would help shape her style of writing and storytelling in her coming years.
As a child, Due gravitated towards writing, creating books with drawings and writing her family’s biography before the age of 10. As a youth, she interned at the Miami Herald and attended programs during the summer for those with ambitions to become writers at Northwestern University. She embarked on this path until it became a reality, graduating from Northwestern University with a B.S. in Journalism and M.A. in English from the University of Leeds in Britain. She then worked for the Miami Herald as a columnist, and after an interview with Anne Rice in 1992, knew that she wanted to be a novelist.
She published her first book “The Between” in 1995, a story about a man named Hilton James who was saved by his grandmother as a child from drowning, but feels as the years roll by that maybe he wasn’t meant to survive that incident as events take place that try to fix what was done. Not only is he facing these singular threats to himself, his wife, who is a judge, receives racist hate mail. He has to not only try to protect his family, but his sanity—and keep his life from the clutches of death. “The Between” was a finalist for a Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel and for Superior Achievement in a First Novel.
Due has published more than several works of her own (such as “My Soul To Keep”, “The Living Blood”, and “Blood Colony”) as well as contributed to anthologies such as “The Living Dead 2” and “This Year’s Best Science Fiction”, and has won an NAACP Image Award, 2002 American Book Award and Black Issues Book Review Award. Due created a course called “The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival And The Black Horror Aesthetic” where she teaches Black Horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA after the film “Get Out” released in theaters. The course was a success, with a visit from the creator of the Oscar-winning film Jordan Peele. She also is the executive producer of “Horror Noire”, a Shudder original film that explores the role of Black creators/creatives in the horror genre, and how they’ve contributed to the genre at large (a must-see for anyone who loves horror and a bit of history mixed in).
Due currently resides in Los Angeles, CA with her husband Stephen Barnes and children, Jason and Lauren, where she teaches at UCLA.
If you haven’t read any of Tananarive Due works, please start with “The Between”. It is an amazing psychological thriller with a supernatural and horror blend, and will leave you satisfied. Also, check out “Horror Noire” just in time for my favorite holiday on Shudder. You cannot go wrong, and you will learn a great deal if you haven’t already been in the know on Black folks’ role when it comes to the horror genre (other than being the first to die in horror films—that’s done, we’ve moved on up).
