Steven Barnes
*Steven Barnes was born on this date in 1952. He is Black science fiction, fantasy, and mystery writer.
Barnes is from Los Angeles, CA, and attended Los Angeles High School. He continued at Pepperdine University, majoring in Communication Arts. Barnes is married to Tananarive Due, a writer. The couple lives in Los Angeles and hosts a video blog together. They also taught a course together at UCLA called "The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival & Black Horror." The course is now available as a webinar. Barnes has a daughter from his first marriage and a son from his current marriage.
Barnes is also an avid practitioner of martial and physical arts. He began studying in 1969. He is a black belt in Kenpo Karate. He holds an instructor certificate in Wu Ming Ta and has an instructor candidate ranking in Filipino Kali stick and knife fighting. He is an intermediate student in self-defense pistol shooting. He completed the Yoga Works basic Hatha Yoga instructor program; is studying (an Indonesian fighting system), an aerobic form of yoga. He has written novels, short fiction, screenplays for television, scripts for comic books, animation, newspaper copy, and magazine articles.
Barnes has written several episodes of The Outer Limits and Baywatch. His first published piece of fiction was the 1979 novelette "The Locusts," which was a Hugo Award nominee. Barnes subsequently collaborated on several other books. Barnes said he enjoyed the work, calling it "a tremendous learning opportunity." Barnes's alternate history novel Lion's Blood won the 2003 Endeavour Award. His 2004 Star Wars tie-in novel The Cestus Deception was a New York Times bestseller.
With his wife, and actor Blair Underwood, Barnes won the 2009 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work - Fiction for In the Night of the Heat: A Tennyson Hardwick Novel.
