Author Talk: Horror Master Tananarive Due With Historian Kidada Williams

PLEASE NOTE: This is NOT a ticketed event, which means are seats are available on a first-come, first-serve basis. Registering for Tananarive's talk is highly encouraged in order to receive important updates about his visit.

The Author Series Committee welcomes multiple award winner and bestselling author Tananarive Due, renowned for her contributions to horror and historical fiction. Joining Tananarive in discussion is Wayne State University Professor of History Kidada Williams. They will in conversation about Tananarive's latest work: Mazywood (2026, S&S/Saga Press).

When Johnny—a filmmaker and grandson of the famous Black actress Mazelle Washington—brings his family to Mazywood, the secluded California mountain lodge left behind by his grandmother, he expects a quiet retreat. Instead, he uncovers a legacy of rage, secrets, and terror that has haunted his family for generations.
Set primarily in the present day, with haunting flashbacks to Hollywood’s Golden Age, Mazywood explores three generations while following Johnny as he pieces together the true story of his grandmother. As a young Black actress whose career spanned from the 1920s to the 1940s, Mazelle brushed shoulders with giants like Lena Horne, Clark Gable, and Hattie McDaniel. But beneath her public appearance, she carried a secret she had kept and nurtured since she was a child, when a dark wish came true and changed the course of her life forever.
Now, fifty years after Mazelle’s death, Johnny finds himself confronting the truth she buried—and the consequences she left behind. For a monster lurks outside Mazywood, hidden for generations, and Johnny brought his family to its hunting grounds.

Copies of Mazywood will be available for purchase from Source Booksellers.

About Tananarive: Tananarive Due is an American Book Award and NAACP Image Award­–winning author, who was an executive producer on Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror for Shudder and teaches Afrofuturism and Black Horror at UCLA. Due is the author of several novels and two short story collections. Her novel The Reformatory, is a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner and a New York Times Notable Book and delves into haunting historical fiction, shedding light on the tragedies of the infamous Dozier School for Boys. Her forthcoming novel Mazywood (September 22) is a literary thriller following the grandson of a famous Black actress who returns to his grandmother’s cabin retreat in the California mountains only to encounter the legacy of her rage born in Old Hollywood. She is also coauthor of a civil rights memoir, Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights (with her late mother, Patricia Stephens Due).

About Kidada: Kidada E. Williams is the author of I Saw Death Coming (which was Longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Nonfiction and won the 2024 Organization of American Historians’ Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award) and They Left Great Marks on Me; co-editor of #CharlestonSyllabus; former host and co-producer of the “Seizing Freedom” podcast. She is an elected fellow of the Society of American Historians and a Professor of History at Wayne State University in Detroit.

PLEASE NOTE: This is NOT a ticketed event, which means are seats are available on a first-come, first-serve basis. Registering for Tananarive's talk is highly encouraged in order to receive important updates about his visit.

Questions? Email [email protected]!