Next Saturday will be a proud day for the community.

Two local high school graduates, now college professors and published authors -- Tera W. Hunter and Edda Fields-Black -- are participating on the African Diaspora Panel at the 26th annual Miami Book Fair International.

Miami natives, Tera graduated from Miami Edison Senior High School and Edda from Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart in Coconut Grove. Tera, the daughter of retired longshoreman Willie Hunter and the late lnell Hunter, a retired teacher, earned a bachelor's from Duke University and a Ph.D. from Yale (1990).

Her teaching career began as an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1990) and associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University (1996). In 2007 she joined Princeton University as professor of history. She specializes in African-American history and gender in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Her books include To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Harvard University Press, 1997).

Edda, the daughter of businessman Eddie Fields and historian Dorothy Jenkins Fields, (full disclosure, she's my daughter), Edda has earned a bachelor's from Emory University. Edda was the first recipient of Emory's Cuttino Prize to travel outside of Europe. Her journey to Sierra Leone began a series of six study trips to West Africa. She earned a M.A. at the University of Florida (1995), and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania (2001).

Today she's an associate professor in Carnegie Mellon's department of history and faculty director of the African and African American Studies minor.

She is the author of Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the Diaspora (Indiana University Press).

At the Book Fair, Carol Boyce Davies will moderate the panel, which will feature black women scholars. Formerly a professor at Florida International University, Davies is a professor of African American studies at Cornell University.

Completing the panel: Janis A. Mayes, associate professor of African-American Studies at Syracuse University, and Irene Assiba d' Almeida, professor of Francophone Studies at the University of Arizona.

Meet the panel and enjoy the Street Fair, arts and crafts, exhibits, vendors and more than 350 authors reading and discussing their work.

Dorothy Jenkins Fields, PhD, is a historian and founder of the Black Archives, History and Research Foundation of South Florida Inc. Send feedback, questions or news to djf@bellsouth.net.