Education
bachelor's degree
dramatist dramatist. fiction writer teacher
bachelor's degree
In high school Fields worked in a factory, sold vegetables, and waited tables, but she kept on writing poetry.One of the poems Fields wrote in high school, "The Horizon,"was published in a newspaper in Montgomery, Alabama. She participatedin dramatic productions there and also wrote a play, Al lDay Tomorrow,that was later staged in Knoxville. Dr. Rosey Pool, a concentrationcamp survivor visited the school. After hearing some of Fields's
poems, she included several in her collection Beyondthe Blues
(1962). She taught in Alabama, then went to the University of Edinburgh in 1963. She lived in New York for a short time butreturned to Alabama and took a teaching job at Miles College nearBirmingham in 1968. That year, Fields also published her first bookof poetry, entitled Poems,and received a financial grant from the National Endowment for the
Arts and Humanities. Fields enjoyed teaching and worked in variousplaces as a lecturer or poet-in-residence in the 1970s and 1980s.Fields moved for good to Washington, D.C., in the late 1970s. Three more books of Fields' poetry
appeared in the 1970s and 1980s: Eastof Moonlight(1973), A Summoning, A Shining(1976), and Slow
Coins(1981). She also published several short stories, including thewidely reprinted "Not Your Singing Dancing Spade."In an age when much African-American poetry had a sharp edge or militant tone, Fields' work was low-key, often humorous, and generally oriented toward the roots of black culture.