Title: Tale of a sky-blue dress
First published: 1998
Description: In this, her first prose work, the author of six books of poetry and winner of the most distinguished honors - including a MacArthur Fellowship Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship and a Whiting Award - delivers a passionate, and moving memoir.

It is the story of the only child of a maid and factory worker who moved to Ohio from the segregated South of the fifties. Raised with much love, she flourished until the age of five, when disaster struck, in the form of a girl in a sky-blue dress. Her childhood was shattered by this girl, her babysitter, who took pleasure from inflicting pain, and whose reign of terror, even after its abrupt end, would send poisonous tendrils further into her life.

Yet ultimately, Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress is about how a young woman retrieved her life from the grasp of darkness. It is about refusing to accept tyranny.
Subjects: African American poets, African American women, American Poets, Biography, Childhood and youth, Poets, American, Social life and customs, American Women poets, African American women poets, New York Times reviewed, African americans, biography, Poets, biography, Ohio, social life and customs
Places: Ohio
People: Thylias Moss
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: PS3563.O8856 Z47 1998