Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Dolen Perkins-Valdez is an American novelist and essayist, best known for Wench: A Novel (2010) and Balm (2015).

Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Occupation	Novelist
Language	English
Education	Harvard College (BA) George Washington University (PhD)
Genre	Novel
Notable works	Wench: A Novel (2010); Balm: A Novel (2015)
Website
dolenperkinsvaldez.com

She was chair of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation's Board of Directors.^[1][2]

Early life and education

Dolen Perkins-Valdez attended Harvard College as an undergraduate, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree. While at Harvard, she wrote articles for The Harvard Crimson.^[3] She completed a PhD in English at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. in 2002. Her dissertation was titled "Mob Stories: Race, Nation and Narratives of Racial Violence."^[4]

Career

Perkins-Valdez has published short fiction and essays in magazines including The Kenyon Review, StoryQuarterly, StorySouth, African American Review, PMS: PoemMemoirStory, North Carolina Literary Review, Richard Wright Newsletter, and SLI: Studies in Literary Imagination.^[5]

As of 2016^[update], she is an associate professor at American University in Washington, D.C.^[6]

Wench: A Novel

Perkins-Valdez has said she was inspired to write her debut novel, Wench: A Novel (2010), after reading a biography of W. E. B. Du Bois and coming across a brief reference to the founding of Wilberforce University. The university was noted as having been built on the former grounds of a privately owned resort called Tawawa House, which hosted Southern white plantation owners and their enslaved Black mistresses as regular summer visitors in the antebellum period.^[7]

Wench centers the character of Lizzie, a young enslaved woman, and her complicated relationship with her master. It also explores the lives of three other mistresses of color, whom Lizzie comes to know at the resort. They are influenced by spending time in a free state and seeing free people of color. The book was published by HarperCollins in 2010 and in paperback the following year.

The book received positive reviews.^[8] The paperback edition became a bestseller. The novel was selected by NPR in 2010 as one of five books published that year that was recommended to book clubs.^[9]

Other works

In 2013, Perkins-Valdez was invited to write an introductory essay to the 37th edition of Solomon Northup's autobiography Twelve Years a Slave.^[10]

Her second novel, Balm, was published in May 2015.^[11] The novel is set in Chicago during the Reconstruction era. It explores a Tennessee Black healer named Madge, who was born free; a white widowed spiritualist named Sadie; and a freedman called Hemp from Kentucky, who gained freedom by fighting with the Union army. Each migrated to Chicago after the war, along with thousands of others working to rebuild their lives and to explore new kinds of freedom.^[12] Perkins-Valdez said that she wanted to put the story "somewhere that was absolutely affected by the war but was still, in some ways, peripheral."^[12]

Dolen's third novel Take My Hand was published by Berkley Books/Penguin Random House in spring 2022.^[13] According to its epilogue, it was inspired by a real case in which two sisters, aged 12 and 14, were sterilized against their will in June 1973.

Honors

• 2002–2003, president's postdoctoral fellow at the Center for African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.^[14]
• 2009, finalist for the Robert Olen Butler Prize.^[5]
• 2011, finalist for two NAACP Image Awards and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for fiction, for her novel Wench^[6]
• 2011, First Novelist Award for Wench by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.^[15][16]
• DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Grant to aid in completion of her second novel, Balm.^[16][when?]

Bibliography

• —— (2010). Wench: A Novel (hardcover 1st ed.). New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 9780061706547.
• —— (2015). Balm: A Novel (hardcover 1st ed.). New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 9780062318657.
• —— (2022). Take My Hand (hardcover 1st ed.). New York: Berkley Books. ISBN 9780593337691.
• —— (2025). Happy Land (hardcover 1st ed.). New York: Berkley Books. ISBN 978-0593337721.