Dolen Perkins-Valdez | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Occupation | Writer and professor |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | American |
| Citizenship | US |
| Education | Harvard College (BA) George Washington University (PhD) |
| Genre | Novel |
| Notable works | Wench: A Novel (2010); Balm: A Novel (2015) |
| Website | |
| dolenperkinsvaldez | |
Dolen Perkins-Valdez is an American writer, best known for her debut novel Wench: A Novel (2010), which became a bestseller.
She is chair of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation Board of Directors. [1]
Dolen Perkins-Valdez attended Harvard College as an undergraduate, earning a BA degree. She completed a PhD in English at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
Perkins-Valdez has published short fiction and essays in such magazines as The Kenyon Review , StoryQuarterly , StorySouth , African American Review, PMS: PoemMemoirStory, North Carolina Literary Review, Richard Wright Newsletter, and SLI: Studies in Literary Imagination. [2]
As of 2016 [update] she was an associate professor at American University in Washington, D.C. [3]
Perkins-Valdez has said she was inspired to write her debut novel, Wench: A Novel (2010), after reading a biography of W.E.B. Dubois and coming across a brief reference to the founding of Wilberforce University. It was noted as first being based at[ clarification needed ] the buildings and grounds of a former, privately owned resort called Tawawa House, named for the "yellow springs" in the area. The iron-rich waters were thought to have medicinal value. Among the regular summer visitors to the Ohio resort in the antebellum period were Southern white planters and their enslaved mistresses of color. [4]
Wench features 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 there. It was published by HarperCollins in 2010 and in paperback the following year.
The book received positive reviews and notice as a debut novel. [5] 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, for "something to talk about". [6]
In 2013, Perkins-Valdez was invited to write an introductory essay to the 37th edition of Solomon Northup's autobiography Twelve Years a Slave . [7]
Her second novel, Balm, was published in May 2015. [8] 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. [9]
Perkins-Valdez said 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." [9]
Dolen's third novel Take My Hand was published by Berkley Books/Penguin Random House in Spring 2022. [10] 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.
Michael Cunningham is an American novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for his 1998 novel The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. Cunningham is Professor in the Practice of Creative Writing at Yale University.
A resort is a self-contained commercial establishment that tries to provide most of a vacationer's wants, such as food, drink, swimming, accommodation, sports, entertainment and shopping, on the premises. A hotel is frequently a central feature of a resort and the term resort may be used for a hotel that provides an array of entertainment and recreational activities. Some resorts are also condominium complexes that are timeshares or owned fractionally or wholly owned condominium. A resort is not always a commercial establishment operated by a single company, but in the late 20th century, that sort of facility became more common.
Geraldine Brooks is an Australian-American journalist and novelist whose 2005 novel March won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Ann Patchett is an American author. She received the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction in the same year, for her novel Bel Canto. Patchett's other novels include The Patron Saint of Liars (1992), Taft (1994), The Magician's Assistant (1997), Run (2007), State of Wonder (2011), Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023). The Dutch House was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor. After earning her licence ès lettres degree in Morocco, she received a fellowship to study in the United Kingdom (UK), where she earned an MA in linguistics.
Elizabeth Strout is an American novelist and author. She is widely known for her works in literary fiction and her descriptive characterization. She was born and raised in Portland, Maine, and her experiences in her youth served as inspiration for her novels–the fictional "Shirley Falls, Maine" is the setting of four of her nine novels.
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Kate Christensen is an American novelist. She won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her fourth novel, The Great Man, about a painter and the three women in his life. Her previous novels are In the Drink (1999), Jeremy Thrane (2001), and The Epicure's Lament (2004). Her fifth novel, Trouble (2009), was released in paperback by Vintage/Anchor in June 2010. Her sixth novel, The Astral, was published in hardcover by Doubleday in June 2011. She is also the author of two food-related memoirs, Blue Plate Special and How to Cook a Moose, the latter of which won the 2016 Maine Literary Award for memoir.
American Rust is a novel by American writer Philipp Meyer, published in 2009. It is set in the 2000s, in the fictional town of Buell in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, which is in a rural region referred to as "the Valley" of dilapidated steel towns. The novel focuses on the decline of the American middle class and well-paying manufacturing jobs, and the general sense of economic and social malaise. Meyer's novel received positive reviews, and many publications ranked it one of the best novels of the year.
Maureen Corrigan is an American author, scholar, and literary critic. She is the book critic on the NPR radio program Fresh Air and writes for the "Book World" section of The Washington Post. In 2014, she wrote So We Read On, a book on the origins and power of The Great Gatsby. In 2005, she published a literary memoir Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books. Corrigan was awarded the 2018 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle for her reviews on Fresh Air on NPR and in The Washington Post, and the 1999 Edgar Award for Criticism by the Mystery Writers of America for her book, Mystery & Suspense Writers, with Robin W. Cook.
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Wench: A Novel is the 2010 debut novel of American author Dolen Perkins-Valdez. It explores the lives of four young, enslaved women of color, who are mistresses of their wealthy white masters, men of the South, and who spend summers at Tawawa House, a resort in the free state of Ohio. There the women share their reactions to their lives and seeing a free society and free people of color.
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Kima Jones is an American writer, poet and literary publicist. She is the founder of the Jack Jones Literary Arts, a literary publicity firm.
Dept. of Speculation is a 2014 novel by American author Jenny Offill. The novel received positive reviews, and has been compared to Offill's later work, Weather.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)| External audio | |
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 "'Balm' Looks At Civil War After The Battles, Outside The South", NPR, June 8, 2015 |
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