I love, love, love audiobooks! The vast majority of my reading is on audio, since I can listen to audio while I’m walking, doing the dishes and driving. Do you listen to audiobooks? If so, are there any titles or narrators you’d recommend? Banks always had GREAT book covers with her protagonist Damali Richards, a vampire huntress, in books like “Minion” and “The Awakening.” She was so far ahead of her time! Those Black women were fierce and stylish, and they were appearing long before some other publishers were willing to put Black women on their book covers. I love the way Nnedi Okorafor uses grief and elements of science fiction in her short story “Dark Home” in “Out There Screaming.” What’s something – a fact, a bit of dialogue or something else – that has stayed with you from a recent reading? I can’t think of a book I read that specifically felt exclusionary: I may have started books like those many times, but I do not finish or remember them. So “Mama Day” was completely eye-opening about a different way literature could look and feel. Up until that point, the “canon” in my creative writing studies had steered me toward writing non-genre stories about white male characters having epiphanies. I’d never experienced that blending in a story, and it really helped me better understand that I could write stories closer to my own experiences. Gloria Naylor’s “Mama Day” was electrifying to me because it centered a Black woman protagonist in a story of the metaphysical. ![]() Can you recall a book that felt like it was written with you in mind? It felt very personal, and I expect the story is probably sad. I started to read the first page, but there was an immediate reference to Boot Hill, where my great-uncle Robert Stephens was buried, and I haven’t yet been able to go on. I have not yet read Colson Whitehead’s “The Nickel Boys,” which, like my new novel “The Reformatory,” is set at a fictionalized version of the Dozier School for Boys. I read “Roots” and watched the miniseries, and soon after I did a school project called “My Own Roots” that my father drew illustrations for, based on an incident from our true history. In some ways, that might be the book that has had the MOST impact on me overall, given how often I use historical fiction as a tool for teaching as well as horror. The earliest true impact of a book was Alex Haley’s “Roots,” which I read when I was 11. Do you remember the first book that made an impact on you? I have a couple more short stories to finish in the anthology Jordan Peele helped curate called “Out There Screaming.” It’s so good that I really don’t want it to end! But it truly answers the question: What would it have been like to go back and forth in time to the antebellum slavery era? It’s a fantasy story with horror elements, although she is best known for writing science fiction. Butler’s “Kindred” as an introduction to her work. I recommend different books according to the occasion, but I often find myself recommending Octavia E. ![]() ![]() Is there a book or books you always recommend to other readers? Due’s latest book, “The Reformatory,” is out now. Tananarive Due is the author of several novels and two short story collections, “Ghost Summer: Stories” and “The Wishing Pool and Other Stories.” She teaches Afrofuturism and Black Horror at UCLA, and she is also co-author (with her late mother, Patricia Stephens Due) of a civil rights memoir, “Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights.” Due was an executive producer on “Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror” for Shudder and she’s co-written the graphic novel “The Keeper” and an episode of “The Twilight Zone” with her husband, science fiction author Steven Barnes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |