Dr. Dolen Perkins-Valdez, author of this year's Santa Monica Citywide Reads book selection, signs her debut novel 'Wench' at the Santa Monica Library during her author talk on Saturday, February 26, 2011.
Santa Monica Citywide Reads is a community reading program that encourages those who live, work in or visit Santa Monica to read and discuss the same novel in book discussions and special events held throughout the city.
Wench follows the stories of four slave mistresses – Lizzie, Reenie, Sweet and Mawu – over the course of three summers in pre-Civil War America. Taken by their masters on holiday to Tawawa House, a summer resort in Ohio, the women encounter free blacks and whispers of the abolitionist movement and are forced to consider their lives, their positions back home, and their hopes and dreams for the future. Dolen Perkins-Valdez was inspired to write the novel when she came across a footnote about Tawawa House, a real resort, while researching her own doctoral thesis on slave literature. Wench was borne out of the author’s musings on why, when presented with the possibility of becoming free, some slaves would run, while others would choose to stay with their masters.
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Dolen Perkins-Valdez's fiction and essays have appeared in StoryQuarterly, Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories 2009, The Kenyon Review, PMS: PoemMemoirStory, North Carolina Literary Review, and Richard Wright Newsletter. Born and raised in Memphis, a graduate of Harvard, and a former University of California postdoctoral fellow, Perkins-Valdez lives in Washington, DC. This is her first novel.
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