Biography

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) which was awarded the 2026 Southern Book Prize and named one of two 2026 BCALA Honor Books. It was longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and nominated for an NAACP Image Award.

Happy Land appeared on many "Most Anticipated" lists for 2025, including People, Elle, Reader's Digest, Woman's World, and elsewhere.

Take My Hand was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award and named a Top 20 Book of the Year by the Editors at Amazon.  It was awarded the 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work-Fiction and the 2023 BCALA Award for Fiction. The audiobook version of Take My Hand was named a Best of 2022 by Audible.

The American Bar Association awarded Take My Hand  its prestigious Silver Gavel Award which recognizes an "outstanding work that fosters the American public's understanding of law and the legal system."

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.

In 2013, Dolen wrote the introduction to a special edition of Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave, published by Simon & Schuster, which became a New York Times bestseller. She followed that with an introduction to Elizabeth Keckly's Behind the Scenes, published in 2016, and the  75th anniversary edition of George Orwell's 1984 published by Penguin Random House in 2023.

A graduate of Harvard College, Dolen is a three-time nominee for a United States Artists Fellowship and has established herself as a pre-eminent chronicler of American historical life.