Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Dolen Perkins-Valdez is the author of the New York Times best-seller Wench (Amistad), a startling piece of original fiction that tells the story of four enslaved black women in the years preceding the Civil War. Lauded by People as "a devastatingly beautiful account of a cruel past," Wench has drawn comparisons to Kathryn Stockett's The Help and Edward P. Jones's The Known World. A sought-after keynote speaker, Perkins-Valdez has addressed audiences at the Women's National Book Association, American Library Association, National Black Writers Conference, Santa Monica City Reads, and the Congressional Black Caucus, as well as the New School, Rhodes College, and the University of California at Riverside.

Wench illustrates the stories of four women, brought together every summer at Tawawa House, a resort that caters exclusively to Southern white men and their black, enslaved mistresses. The lives of Lizzie, Reenie, and Sweet, regulars at Tawawa House, are radically changed by the arrival of Mawu, a truth-talking, strong-minded woman unafraid to speak of freedom and escape. When a fire on the resort sets off a string of tragedies, the women of Tawawa house learn that triumph and dehumanization are inseparable, and that love exists even in the most inhuman of circumstances.

Perkins-Valdez's fiction and essays have appeared in The Kenyon Review, StoryQuarterly, African American Review, PMS: PoemMemoirStory, North Carolina Literary Review, Richard Wright Newsletter, and SLI: Studies in Literary Imagination. She is a 2011 NAACP Image Award Nominee, a 2009 finalist for the Robert Olen Butler Fiction Award, a graduate of Harvard, and a former University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow.

She lives in Washington, D.C.

Wench: A Novel

Writing Historical Fiction

Black Women’s History