Edda L. Fields-Black’s previous book, Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora, as well as her work as executive producer and librettist of "Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice" (with Emmy® Award-winning composer John Wineglass), reflect her long involvement with the interconnective story of rice cultivation in pre-colonial West Africa and on antebellum Lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia plantations. She has been a consultant at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the International African American Museum, and the Senator John Heinz
History Center. She is a direct descendant of Africans enslaved on rice plantations in Colleton County, SC and Black soldiers who fought in the Civil War, including her great-great-great grandfather, who fought in the Combahee River Raid. Fields-Black lives with her family in Pittsburgh, where she teaches history and leads the
Dietrich College Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University.
