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Sarah Valentine

Biography

Sarah Valentine

Sarah Valentine, Ph.D., is a widely published author and translator. In 2013, she was a Lannan Foundation Writers Fellow and has taught literature and creative writing at Princeton, University of California–Los Angeles, University of California–Riverside and Northwestern University. In her memoir, WHEN I WAS WHITE, she recounts growing up in Pittsburgh as a mixed race African American in a white family who kept her identity a closely held secret. She lives in Pittsburgh.

Sarah Valentine

Books by Sarah Valentine

Decoding the Devil: Black Women Codebreakers and the Secret War Against Stalin's Bomb
by Sarah Valentine - History, Nonfiction

Facing the global threat of a rising Communist world power in the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. employed hundreds of Black Americans to speed read Russian communications and gather essential information on their most dangerous nuclear rival. The result was the creation of a segregated civilian codebreaking unit known as the Traffic Processing Division --- The Plantation. Its 100 college-educated Black women made invaluable breakthroughs in the country’s Soviet intelligence, even as the Red Scare and the backlash against civil rights eroded their democratic freedoms at home. Their underappreciated top-secret work led directly to victory over the USSR and the end of the Cold War 30 years later. In DECODING THE DEVIL, Sarah Valentine tells their remarkable story in full for the first time.