TACOMA, Wash. – Dolen Perkins-Valdez, assistant professor of English at University of Puget Sound, has published a debut novel, Wench, which is being released by HarperCollins in January 2010. The work of historical fiction, set in pre-Civil War America, has drawn considerable interest and a highly positive response from reviewers of contemporary fiction.

Perkins-Valdez will begin a four-month book tour in early January, including stops in New York, Washington. D.C., Memphis, Los Angeles, Riverside, Denver, and Baltimore. The author will give a presentation at University of Puget Sound at 7 p.m., Wednesday, March 24, in Wheelock Student Center’s Murray Boardroom. The public is welcome.

Wench follows the lives of four enslaved African American women who are brought to the resort of Tawawa House in Ohio by their wealthy white owners each summer. The book explores the complexities of relationships in slavery and draws on research about the resort that was eventually to become the nation’s first black college, Wilberforce University.

A review in the January issue of Essence magazine comments that “Perkins-Valdez manages to shed a poetic light on one of the ugliest chapters in American history.” Jeffrey Lent, author of In the Fall and A Peculiar Grace, described the book as “a striking story of heart and mind. Wench captures time and delivers it to us.”

The book will be reviewed in USA Today, as well as the February issues of O, The Oprah Magazine and Town & Country.

Perkins-Valdez, who is on leave during the 2009–10 academic year, teaches in areas including creative writing, literary theory, contemporary American literature, African American literature, and aesthetics. Her fiction and essays have appeared or will appear in The Kenyon Review, StoryQuarterly, PMS: Poem Memoir Story, North Carolina Literary Review, Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories 2009, and African American Review. Perkins-Valdez is a graduate of Harvard and a former University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow.

Press-quality photos of Dolen Perkins-Valdez and the book jacket are available on request.

For directions and a map of the campus: www.pugetsound.edu/directions.xml 

Tweet this: Wench, historical novel by Dolen Perkins-Valdez @univpugetsound, to be reviewed in USA Today, Oprah mag. http://bit.ly/7BcMeD

Follow us on Twitter! www.twitter.com/univpugetsound