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]
Charlotte Mary Mew was an English poet whose work spanned the eras of Victorian poetry and Modernism.
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