ACHUKA Book of the Day 9 Dec 2025
See also:
I’ll See You in Ijebu by Bunmi Emenanjo ill. Diana Ejaita [ACHUKA Book of the Day 19 Mar 2025]
“Beautifully crafted and compellingly celebratory.” KIRKUS
“In stunning saturated colorblock illustrations that foreground Wilds’s work and transformation, Ejaita plays with scale and proportion.” PublishersWeekly
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 as a photograph and a small selection of her poems.
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 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.
You can follow the illustrator, Diana Ejaita, on . ACHUKA always lover her New Yorker cover art:
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"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."-Myra Viola WildFeatured: https://t.co/Jj9poFm5UB @abramskids @EastWestLit pic.twitter.com/O83A3fG2j4
— Jeanne Walker Harvey 📚 (@JeanneWHarvey) February 19, 2025
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God gets the Folio Society treatment in a stunning new edition illustrated by Diana Ejaita and introduction by Zadie Smith.https://t.co/mZmiQwxeLn pic.twitter.com/OQEhin9hOb
— Melan Magazine (@Melanmagazine) September 18, 2025
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