Fields Watered with Blood

Critical Essays on Margaret Walker

Edited by Maryemma Graham

Title Details

Pages: 384

Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in

Formats

Paperback

Pub Date: 04/25/2014

ISBN: 9-780-8203-3886-6

List Price: $36.95

eBook

Pub Date: 04/25/2014

ISBN: 9-780-8203-4698-4

List Price: $36.95

Fields Watered with Blood

Critical Essays on Margaret Walker

Edited by Maryemma Graham

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  • Description
  • Reviews
  • Contributors

Representing an international gathering of scholars, Fields Watered with Blood—now available in paperback—constituted the first critical assessment of the full scope of Margaret Walker’s literary career. As they discuss Walker’s work, including the landmark poetry collection For My People and the novel Jubilee, the contributors reveal the complex interplay of concerns and themes in Walker’s writing: folklore and prophecy, place and space, history and politics, gender and race. In addition, the contributors remark on how Walker’s emphases on spirituality and on dignity in her daily life make themselves felt in her writings and show how Walker’s accomplishments as a scholar, teacher, activist, mother, and family elder influenced what and how she wrote.

A brief biography, an interview with literary critic Claudia Tate, a chronology of major events in Walker’s life, and a selected bibliography round out this collection, which will do much to further our understanding of the writer whom poet Nikki Giovanni once called “the most famous person nobody knows.”

Given her self-prescribed role as a spiritual and intellectual leader—one her readers and reviewers gladly acknowledge—Walker’s penetrating analyses and carefully constructed images of black life in America bespeak an uncompromising commitment to the integrity of an African American world view, one she considered essential for ‘saving’ America from its own destruction.

—Maryemma Graham and Deborah Whaley, from the Introduction

Tomeiko R. Ashford Carter

Jacqueline Miller Carmichael

Michelle Cliff

Esim Erdim

Maryemma Graham

Minrose C. Gwin

Robert Harris

Amy Levin

R. Baxter Miller

Joyce Pettis

Hiroko Sato

Melissa Walker Heidari

Jerry W. Ward

Bernice Lloyd Bell

B. Dilla Buckner

Eugenia Collier

Ekaterini Georgoudaki

Charlotte Goodman

Florence Howe

Phyllis R. Klotman

James E. Spears

Claudia Tate

Eleanor Traylor

Deborah Elizabeth Whaley

About the Author/Editor

MARYEMMA GRAHAM is a professor of English and African American studies at the University of Kansas, where she directs the Project on the History of Black Writing. Among her books are two edited collections, On Being Female, Black, and Free: Essays by Margaret Walker, 1932-1992 and "How I Wrote Jubilee" and Other Essays on Life and Literature by Margaret Walker.