AN EXTRAORDINARY WOMAN: THE LEGACY OF HARRIET TUBMAN – NONFICTION

Miami native DR. DOROTHY JENKINS FIELDS, PH.D., started the movement to preserve Miami Dade’s Black history as a volunteer in 1974, when no one was keeping Black memorabilia. She was assigned by Miami-Dade Public Schools to HistoryMiami Museum for the 1976 U.S. Bicentennial and incorporated The Black Archives in 1977. She was also a 2024-2025 creative futures fellow at the University of Miami’s Center for Black Global Studies. Fields’ proudest accomplishments are her grandchildren Akhu Black, Mary Black, and Phineas Marsh; and her daughters Katherine Marsh, an attorney, and Edda Black, a history professor and 2025 Pulitzer Prize winner in history.

DR. EDDA L. FIELDS-BLACK, PH.D., a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, teaches history at Carnegie Mellon University and serves as director of the Dietrich College Humanities Center. A descendant of Africans enslaved on rice plantations in Colleton County, South Carolina, and a USCT soldier (her great-great-great grandfather) from Beaufort County who fought in the Combahee River Raid in June 1863, she has written extensively about the transnational history of West African rice farmers. She was a co-editor of Rice: Global Networks and New Histories, which was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. She consulted for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture's permanent exhibition, "Rice Fields in the Low Country of South Carolina." She is also the executive producer and librettist of Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice, a widely performed original contemporary classical work by celebrated composer John Wineglass. Her book, Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War (Oxford University Press), has been named winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History; the 2025 Gilder Lehrman Institute Lincoln Prize; the Society of Civil War Historians 2025 Tom Watson Brown Award; the South Carolina Historical Society 2024 George C. Rogers Jr. Award; and the Association for Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society’s 2024 Marsha M. Greenlee History Award. In addition, Combee was also named to several best-of lists in 2024, including by The New Yorker.