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SARAH VALENTINE, PhD 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. She has a PhD from Princeton in Russian language and history. In her 2026 book, Decoding the Devil, she tells the story of two segregated codebreaking units racing to unlock Stalin’s atomic secrets in the face of a rapidly expanding Soviet nuclear threat at the dawn of the Cold War. In her earlier 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 currently lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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