Sarah Valentine, PhD, is a widely published author and translator whose awards include an NEH Public Scholar grant and a Lannan Foundation fellowship. Valentine has taught literature and creative writing at Princeton, UCLA, UC Riverside, and Northwestern University.

Her latest book, DECODING THE DEVIL: Black Women Codebreakers and the Secret War Against Stalin's Bomb (HarperCollins June 2026), reveals a top-secret team of Black codebreakers that provided critical intelligence to stop the US from starting a nuclear war.

In her memoir, WHEN I WAS WHITE (St. Martin's 2019), she recounts growing up in Pittsburgh as a mixed-race Black girl in a white family who kept her identity a closely held secret. She lives in Pittsburgh.