On her father's side, Verdelle is a fourth-generation Washingtonian, a descendant of the sequestered and little studied freedmen's community of free people of color that flourished in the 19th century after the end of slavery and reconstruction in the nation's capital.
Verdelle attended La Reine, a private Catholic girls' high school in Suitland, Maryland, a Prince George's County suburb of Washington, D.C. She graduated from college in 1982 from the University of Chicago with a B.A.
She earned an MFA in creative writing from Bard College, in the Hudson Valley of New York, in 1993.
[1] In 2010, Verdelle was featured in a documentary, Cheating the Stillness, chronicling the life of Julia Peterkin, who, in 1929, was the first American woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Verdelle had studied Peterkin's oeuvre, and featured her novel Scarlet Sister Mary in the narrative interior of The Good Negress.