Dressmaker and Poet, Myra Viola Wilds
A TRUE TALE WITH
A CHERRY ON TOP
Cameron Kids/Abrams
(pub. 1.14.2025.)
32 pages
Ages 4 - 8
Author: Nancy Johnson James
Illustrator: Diana Ejaita
Character: Myra VIola Wilds
Overview:
" 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."
Tantalizing taste:
"Dream a dress that is a poem,
like Myra would have made.
Words with color, form, and song.
Lines stitched short, curved, and long.
Dream a dream when you struggle,
between a painful past and a hopeful tomorrow.
Remember when light began to fade.
Myra's art could still be made."
And something more: The book beings with one of her poems:
"Thoughts" by Myra Viola Winds
What kind of thoughts now, do you carry
In your travels day by day
Are they bright and lofty visions,
Or neglected, gone astray?
Matter not how great in fancy
Or what deed of skill you've wrought;
Man, though high may be his station,
Is not better than his thoughts.
Catch your thoughts and hold them tightly,
Let each one an honor be;
Purge the, scourge them, burnish brightly,
Then in love set each one free."