Dolen Perkins-Valdez is an American novelist and essayist. She studied at Harvard College, earned a PhD in English at George Washington University in 2002, and now teaches literature at American University. She has also chaired the board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.
Her novels are historical fiction about Black American life, usually built around episodes that history books pass over quickly. Take My Hand is set in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1973. Civil Townsend, a young nurse at a family planning clinic, learns that two sisters in her care have been sterilized without consent. The story grew out of the real case of Mary Alice and Minnie Lee Relf. Happy Land, from 2025, follows a woman who discovers that her family is tied to a real Black kingdom in the mountains of North Carolina during Reconstruction, and it moves between two timelines.
Wench, her 2010 debut, was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and for two NAACP Image Awards. Take My Hand won the 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in fiction, and her website lists the 2026 Southern Book Prize for Happy Land. She also wrote the introduction to a 2013 edition of Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave.
The book listed here is Orwell's 1984, and her part in it is the introduction to the 75th anniversary edition. There she reads the novel as a first-time reader would, and pauses over Winston Smith's contempt for women and the absence of Black characters. Some commentators attacked this as a trigger warning. An academic quoted by Newsweek called it reflective rather than ideological.
To read her own fiction, start with Take My Hand. It shows what she does best: a documented injustice told through one person's conscience. Wench and Happy Land come next.
