Julia Fields

Julia Fields (born January 21, 1938) is an American writer and poet.

Fields was born on January 21, 1938, in Bessemer, Alabama.^[1][2] Her father worked as a preacher, farmer, carpenter, and storekeeper.^[2] Fields' early jobs included selling vegetables, waitressing, and factory work, influences that later mingled in her writing with her immersion in African-American churches (their music as well as the lyrical qualities of scripture) and her early interests in botany and poetry.^[2] She attended the Presbyterian Knoxville College, graduating in 1961, then studied in at the University of Edinburgh in 1963.^[2] She met Langston Hughes in London and he became a mentor to her.^[2] In 1971, she earned a master's degree from Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College.^[2] She taught high school in Alabama as well as poetry and writing at Hampton Institute, East Carolina University, Howard University, and North Carolina State University.^[1]

Influenced by poets of the Harlem Renaissance like Hughes and Georgia Douglas Johnson, as well as black activists of 1960s,^[1] Fields published a collection Poems (1968), following a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities; All Day Tomorrow (1966), a three-act play;^[3] East of Moonlight (1973);^[2] A Summoning, a Shining (1976);^[2] Slow Coins (1981);^[1] and The Green Lion of Zion Street (1988), a children's collection.^[4] In Southern Writers: A New Biographical Dictionary, Sara Andrews Johnston emphasized the thematic breadth of Fields' work, "hallowing the natural world, with farmers as poets, and criticizing a stultifying suburbia, hollow imitations of jazz, or obsessive materialism; they encompass love spent, outrage at lynching and other racial injustices, touching portraits of those in occupations limited by race, and a joyous cry of freedom from a lifestyle racially constricted, in 'High on the Hog.'"^[2]