What dreams do you carry? Myra Viola Wilds dreamed of opportunity.
She left her home in rural Kentucky for the city, learned to read and to write, and became a dressmaker. She hand-stitched gorgeous gowns. She worked so hard she lost her eyesight, and her world went dark. But those well-loved stitches turned into words, and one night Myra woke in the middle of the night and wrote a poem she called “Sunshine.”
She kept writing. She wrote the lush green, sweet-corn yellow, cerulean blue, sunshine-y world from memory, collecting her poems into a book called Thoughts of Idle Hours, published in 1915.
This lyrical, gorgeously illustrated picture book biography celebrates this little-known poet and includes a biography that provides context to her life—the Great Migration, Jim Crow segregation—as well a photograph and a small selection of her poems.