Julia Fields emerged as a poet and creative writer in the 1960s, but her works are seldom identified with the themes of social turmoil, the bold language of racial confrontation, the defiant stance of black cultural separatism, and the daring iconoclastic artistic forms that marked the black arts movement and dominated the writings of other young black poets of the era. Fields, nevertheless, is an important representative of the cultural and artistic renaissance that gave birth to her writings, not only because her poems and short stories probe the political, social, and moral status of black people, but because they are saturated with their authentic language, sensibilities, values, rituals, and myths. Against a background of surging and resurging black consciousness and aesthetics, her works capture and reflect the folk spirit in black life, shatter the illusions of history, and demystify sacred areas of Southern life and black experience...