Dolen Perkins Valdez Books in Order

If you want her core novels in publication order: Wench → Balm → Take My Hand → Happy Land
If you want the easiest place to start: Take My Hand
If you want Civil War and Reconstruction settings: Wench → Balm
If you want a wider family story with land at the center: Happy Land

Dolen Perkins-Valdez grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, and books seem to have pointed her toward both scholarship and storytelling. She studied at Harvard, later earned an MFA from the University of Memphis, and completed a PhD in English at George Washington University. Before readers knew her as a novelist, she was already the kind of person who paid close attention to what history leaves out.

That habit of following small clues became her way into fiction.

After graduate school, and a postdoctoral fellowship in African American Studies at UCLA, Perkins-Valdez kept circling the same question: how do you write toward people who rarely got to leave their own full record behind? One answer arrived when she was reading about W.E.B. Du Bois and the founding of Wilberforce University. She came across a brief mention of Tawawa House, an Ohio resort where enslavers vacationed with the enslaved women they kept, and that fragment would not let her go.

It became Wench, her 2010 debut. The novel follows four Black women at Tawawa House as friendship, fear, coercion, attachment, and the dangerous possibility of escape reshape their summers. Readers who come to Perkins-Valdez through Wench often stay for the same reason: she writes from history, but not at a safe distance. Her work is interested in private feeling as much as public events.

That balance carried into Balm, a novel set in post Civil War Chicago. Instead of battlefield heroics, she focused on the long, messy work of surviving afterward. Madge, Sadie, and Hemp arrive in a city full of promise and pain, each carrying grief, longing, and a different kind of gift. The book shows one of Perkins-Valdez's trademarks, her interest in what healing might look like after a nation breaks people apart.

Then came Take My Hand, which brought her to 1970s Alabama and the real history of forced sterilization. Through the young nurse Civil Townsend, Perkins-Valdez writes about conscience, complicity, race, medicine, and the cost of telling the truth. The novel struck a chord with readers and won the 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Fiction. It also helped introduce her work to many people who had not yet picked up the earlier books.

History is her subject, but recovery is often the engine.

That same pull runs through Happy Land, a multigenerational story set partly in western North Carolina, where a woman uncovers her family's ties to the real Kingdom of the Happy Land. Across these books, Perkins-Valdez returns again and again to Black women's lives, family silence, land, memory, and communities trying to hold on to dignity. The hard parts are there. So is the stubborn reach toward repair.

Alongside her novels, she has published essays and short fiction, and she has written introductions for special or anniversary editions of Twelve Years a Slave, Behind the Scenes, and George Orwell's 1984. Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Teaching has stayed close to the center of her life, too, which makes sense for a writer so interested in passing stories forward instead of letting them disappear.

Teaching matters to her.

Perkins-Valdez is an associate professor in the creative writing program at American University in Washington, D.C. She has also worked with PEN/Faulkner's education efforts, speaking with students in D.C. public schools about reading and writing. She lives in Washington with her family, still writing the kind of fiction that can begin with a footnote and open into a whole lost world.