Read Up Richmond 2024 features Dolen Perkins-Valdez, author of Take My Hand, in conversation with Linda Janet Holmes. Take My Hand is inspired by true events and is a profoundly moving novel about a Black nurse in post-segregation Alabama who blows the whistle on a terrible wrong done to her patients. Their conversation will be followed by a Q&A period. Work from both authors will be available for purchase at the library and a signing will be held after the main event.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez is the New York Times bestselling author of Wench (2010), Balm (2015), and most recently Take My Hand (2022). Take My Hand was named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by Newsweek, San Francisco Chronicle, Essence, NBC News, and elsewhere. The novel 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. Dolen is a three-time nominee for a United States Artists Fellowship and is currently Associate Professor in the Literature Department at American University and lives in Washington, DC with her family.
Linda Janet Holmes is an award-winning writer, biographer, oral historian, curator, and long-time women’s health and birthing justice activist. She has written extensively on and curated exhibits about the rich history and contributions of Black midwives. Holmes’ first book, Listen to me Good: The Life Story of an Alabama Midwife (Ohio State University Press, 1996) is co-authored with Margaret Charles Smith, who at the time was the oldest living traditional African American midwife in Alabama. in 2023, Ms. Holmes’ published Safe in a Midwife’s Hands: Birthing Traditions from Africa to the American South (OSU Press, 2023). Based on oral histories she conducted with the last generation of traditional Black midwives in Alabama in the 1980s, and more recently, from the stories she recorded with traditional midwives in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Ghana, and midwives from Virginia, Safe in a Midwife’s Hands powerfully details the birth traditions and practices of African descendant midwives across the diaspora. Holmes’ research and writing on Black midwives is influenced by her work at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, where she held a faculty appointment with the nurse midwife educational program, and her work at the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior services, where she served as Director of the Office of Minority and Multi-Cultural Health. A resident of Hampton, Virginia, Ms. Holmes relishes her early morning walks by Hampton’s Salt Ponds where an array of water birds are a treasured source of peace and inspiration.
Special thanks to Fountain Bookstore.
Read Up Richmond challenges people to read differently, to read outside one’s own lived experience to develop an understanding of the world. This program is an opportunity for people from different walks of life to come together in the library to learn together, to enter into a conversation with the larger community, to share the same space, making Richmond a more connected, more civil place. This program is made possible through the generous support of the Richmond Public Library Foundation and the Friends of the Richmond Public Library.