Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Dolen Perkins-Valdez is an American writer, best known for her debut novel Wench (2010).
She is a member of the PEN/Faulkner Board of Directors. She teaches at American University.

Perkins-Valdez was inspired to write her debut novel, Wench, while reading an autobiography of W.E.B. Dubois. The book mentioned in passing that the land for Wilberforce University had once been used for a privately owned resort called Tawawa House, where white slave owners would bring the black slaves they kept as mistresses. Wench, about a young slave named Lizzie and her complicated relationship with the man who owns her, was published by Harper Collins in 2010 and received positive reviews. The novel was awarded the First Novelist Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library in 2011.

In 2013, Perkins-Valdez wrote an introductory essay to the 37th edition of Solomon Northup's autobiography Twelve Years a Slave.

Her second novel, Balm: A Novel was published in May 2015. The novel was set in Chicago during the Reconstruction Era and followed a white widowed spiritualist named Sadie, a free born black healer named Madge and a newly freed black man called Hemp as they tried to navigate a city still in mourning after the war. Perkins-Valdez stated that she wanted to "move the story out of the battlegrounds of the war into a place like Chicago [...] taking it out of those traditional spaces such as the South or even thinking of Virginia or Pennsylvania... and putting it somewhere that was absolutely affected by the war but was still, in some ways, peripheral."