Dolen Perkins-Valdez
“I would say that you can’t look for a story. It has to find you... [B]e human and observe the world around you. The ideas will come.”
Dolen Perkins-Valdez is the New York Times bestselling author of Wench (2010), Balm (2015), Take My Hand (2022), and most recently Happy Land (2025). Take My Hand was awarded the 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work–Fiction, the 2023 BCALA Award for Fiction, a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award, and named a Top 20 Book of the Year by the Editors at Amazon. The audiobook version of Take My Hand was named a Best of 2022 by Audible. In 2023, American Bar Association awarded Take My Hand its prestigious Silver Gavel Award, which recognizes "outstanding work that fosters the American public's understanding of law and the legal system."
Happy Land appeared on many "Most Anticipated" lists for 2025, including People, Elle, Reader's Digest, Woman's World, and elsewhere.
In 2011, Wench was a finalist for two NAACP Image Awards and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for fiction, and in 2017, HarperCollins released Wench as one of eight "Olive Titles," limited edition modern classics that included books by Edward P. Jones, Louise Erdrich, and Zora Neale Hurston.
Dolen has established herself as a pre-eminent chronicler of American historical life. In 2013, she wrote the introduction to a special edition of Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave, and recently wrote the introduction to the 75th anniversary edition of George Orwell's 1984. Dolen is a three-time nominee for a United States Artists Fellowship and is currently Associate Professor in the Literature Department at American University. She lives in Washington, DC with her family.
