Joy Keys chats with Author Tananarive Due

SPECIAL GUEST: Tananarive Due — pronounced tah-nah-nah-REEVE doo — is the American Book Award-winning author of novels, screenplays and a civil rights memoir. Her newest novel, Blood Colony (June 2008), is the sequel to her 2001 thriller The Living Blood and 1997’s My Soul to Keep. Her novella “Ghost Summer” is included in the collection The Ancestors collection, a January Essence Book Club pick. Due also collaborates with her husband, Steven Barnes. They published their first mystery, Casanegra: A Tennyson Hardwick Novel (2007), in collaboration with actor Blair Underwood. The series continued with In the Night of the Heat, published in September. Blood Colony and In the Night of the Heat were both nominated for 2009 NAACP Image Awards. Due and Barnes sold their screenplay adaptation of her novel The Good House to Fox Searchlight. Due also co-authored a memoir with her mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephen Due: Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. (Patricia Stephens Due took part in the nation’s first “Jail-In” in 1960, spending 49 days in jail in Tallahassee, Florida, after a sit-in at a Woolworth lunch counter). Due just won an NAACP Image Awards in the category of Outstanding Literary Work – Fiction for “In the Night of the Heat: A Tennyson Hardwick Novel" by Blair Underwood, Tananarive Due, Steven Barnes Due lives in Southern California with Barnes; their son, Jason; and her stepdaughter, Nicki. Her website is at www.tananarivedue.com.