Perkins-Valdez, an associate professor in the literature department at American University and the current chair of the board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, considers herself “somebody who excavates.” Though she was well aware of America’s ugly history of sterilizing women without their consent (as written about in 1998’s Killing the Black Body by Dorothy Roberts, a book she has two copies of), there was something about the Relf sisters she kept coming back to. The landmark case led to the requirement for informed consent prior to sterilization procedures. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, exposing a vast, federally funded campaign of sterilization of primarily impoverished people. With the help of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the family responded with a lawsuit that challenged the U.S. In the case of her new novel, Take My Hand, out from Berkley in April, it was the true story of Mary Alice and Minnie Lee Relf who, in 1973 at ages 12 and 14, were surgically sterilized without their consent in Montgomery, Ala. “I’m often looking at the stories that weren’t told, but that really, really need to be told.” What usually pushes me to write the book is I can’t stop thinking about something, and I need other people to go there with me,” Dolen Perkins-Valdez says via Zoom from her home in Washington, D.C.
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