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.