Tananarive Due: Mazywood

ACCESSIBILITY: Strand Book Store is an ADA-compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator. ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at [email protected] by Sept. 8 to request. Please ask a Strand employee upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred. For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact [email protected] --------------------------------------------------------------------- S. A. Cosby's All the Sinners Bleed meets Percival Everett's Erasure in this literary thriller following the grandson of a famous Black actress from the 1920s to the 1940s, now a filmmaker himself, who returns to his grandmother's cabin retreat in the California mountains only to encounter the legacy of her rage born in Old Hollywood. Award-winning author Tananarive Due returns with the follow-up to the multi-award-winning The Reformatory in this generational novel of rage. With flashbacks to Johnny’s grandmother—who brushed shoulders with giants like Lena Horne, Clark Gable, and Hattie McDaniel—this novel explores three generations, beginning with Mazelle Washington’s life as a young actress. Fifty years after Mazelle’s death, Johnny will discover the secret she kept and nurtured since she was a child, when she had a dark wish come true. A monster lurks outside Mazywood, hidden for generations, and Johnny brought his family to its hunting grounds. Photo credit: Larry Traevon 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. She and her husband, science fiction author Steven Barnes, cowrote the graphic novel The Keeper and an episode for Season 2 of The Twilight Zone for Paramount Plus and Monkeypaw Productions. Due is the author of several novels and two short story collections, Ghost Summer: Stories and The Wishing Pool and Other Stories. 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). Learn more at TananariveDue.com. Victor LaValle is the author of eight works of fiction and two graphic novels. His most recent novel, Lone Women, was a national bestseller. His novel The Changeling was adapted as a series for Apple TV. He adapted his novel for AMC as a limited series, The Terror: Devil in Silver, and served as its showrunner. He has received a World Fantasy Award, two Bram Stoker Awards, and two Shirley Jackson Awards, among others. He serves as the Chair of the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia University.