Science Fiction, Civil Rights and Zombies

Featured writers include Tananarive Due, Steven Barnes, Samuel R. Delany, Jewelle Gomez, Nalo Hopkinson, Brandon Massey, Nisi Shawl and Sheree Renee Thomas

12:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., today. Short film festival from 12:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. Music and art exhibition from 3 p.m to 4 p.m. 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. panel discussion with authors, book signing afterward. Free. Spelman College, Cosby Auditorium, 350 Spelman Lane SW; Event will be live streamed at www.spelman.edu. 404-681-3643

March 27

Due and her father civil rights attorney, John Due, discuss “FREEDOM IN THE FAMILY: A MOTHER-DAUGHTER MEMOIR OF THE FIGHT FOR CIVIL RIGHTS,” (One World Publishing), the 2003 memoir by Tananarive Due and her mother Patricia Stephens Due. Due’s mother died last year. The book documents the late woman’s involvement in the civil rights movement of the 1960s in North Florida and its legacy and impact on her daughter, Tananarive. 4 p.m. Wed. March 27. Free. Spelman College, Cole Living and Learning Building auditorium, 350 Spelman Lane SW. www.spelman.edu. 404-681-3643

Let’s say both of your parents were big civil rights workers.

Your father was a civil rights attorney. Your mother was a lifelong civil rights activist who was nearly blinded when a Florida policeman threw a tear gas canister in her face during a 1960 march for integration. Growing up, you had to attend every NAACP event in town.

Given that background, how would you then become one of the more successful science-fiction writers in the nation, bandmate to authors Dave Barry, Roy Blount, Jr. and the other members of the Rock Bottom Remainders, and a novelist Stephen King felt was good enough to blurb? Cool life, right?

This has been the path of Tananarive Due, American Book Award-winning author of 12 sci-fi novels including “The Between,” and “My Soul to Keep.” A former reporter for the Miami Herald and creative writing professor in California, Due is winding up her stint in the Cosby Chair of the Humanities at Spelman College this semester. Apart from the major influence of her parents, Due was greatly shaped by the work of pioneering sci-fi/fantasy author Octavia E. Butler. The late Butler is considered the matriarch of African-American sci-fi writers, and years ago Due met her at a conference at Clark Atlanta University for black sci-fi authors. (She also met her future husband, novelist and television writer Stephen Barnes, there too, but that’s another story.)

On Thursday, Due is bringing in some of the nation’s noted African-American science fiction/fantasy writers to Spelman as part of a half-day public celebration of Butler’s work. Here, Due, who grew up in Miami, talks about her own curious route to writing about the supernatural, zombies included.

Q: How did a kid growing up in a civil rights household wind up writing about aliens?

A: Though my late mother, Patricia Stephens Due, was a civil rights activist, she did have her playful side and for entertainment she loved horror movies. From the time I was a kid, when those creature features like "The Wolfman," and "The Fly," would come on television, that's what we would watch on a Saturday afternoon. And as a teenager I grew up reading Stephen King, but also Toni Morrison, who was telling in books like "Beloved," a different kind of horror novel, though steeped in history.

Q: So good old B-movies.

A: I was just drawn to that, and for many of us who will be on the writers' panel (at the Octavia Butler event), growing up we felt like outsiders. If I look for one thread that unites these writers, it was that very often you felt like you were on the outside of society for whatever reason. For me it was being raised in newly integrated neighborhoods where we were not welcomed by the white families and kids. And then I was a little bit of an oddity to the black kids, that I was to them that "Oreo." I felt that I was between, which is not a coincidence that my first novel was called "The Between."

Q: What were some of the lessons from that experience that helped you in your writing career?

A: That environment of isolation is sometimes what creates writers. You're not asked to sit at the table with the popular kids. I was a target because of my skin color and I learned to walk with my eyes cast down at the sidewalk. I was already drawing my perceptions inward, blocking out my external environment with the exception of family. But my parents were really supportive of my writing from the time I was four years old. I wrote a book back then called "Baby Bobby," and my mother made copies and gave them to everybody in church. So maybe isolation creates a writer, but they need some sense that their writing is worth reading. For me that came from my parents.

Q: In what other ways did you feel the outsider?

A: I'm part of that post-segregation generation. I was born in 1966, I don't remember ever seeing a "White Only," or "Colored Only" sign. But when I was four and my parents moved to Miami (from north Florida), they were trying to enroll me in a private Montessori school. They went from school to school and they were told again and again that they only accepted white children. I don't remember feeling hurt about it or sad about it, I just remember feeling, 'Okay, I need to fix this.' So I saw some baby powder on the counter and I rubbed it all over my skin. I was just proud of myself that I'd 'solved' the problem and I went to my mother and said 'Mommy, will they let me go to school now?' Years later when I was an adult, she would tear up when she told the story.

Q: You’re an accomplished solo author but you and your husband Stephen Barnes write two series together, the Tennyson Hardwick series and a new, young adult zombie series, “Devil’s Wake.” How do two wildly creative people write together?

A: When you're collaborating you have to sometimes take it slowly, especially when you're collaborating with a loved one. With the "Devil's Wake" series, we come up with a story together and Steve takes the first draft, then I come behind doing some revising and polishing. For the Tennyson Hardwick series it's the opposite. But we have learned one important thing working together: One of you has to have the last say. Everything cannot be up to a vote. One of you has to have the power to overrule. If you're doing the first draft, then you have the final say.

Q: Do you still play in a rock band?

A: I used to play keyboards and sing with 'The Rock Bottom Remainders,' with Dave Barry and Stephen King, when I was in Miami. They were all novelists who were also musicians. That's how I met King. I gave him a copy of my book and that's how I got a blurb. In my novel "Joplin's Ghost," it is no coincidence that the protagonist is basically a rock star. So if I have an unfulfilled dream, it would be to be in a band. So let me put it out there. I play funk, salsa, rock. I'm not saying I play it well, but according to "Rock Band," the PlayStation game, I'm not a bad drummer either.