Courage for Your Dreams: Angela Vinson
Women in our World
Although she taught school and was involved in special education for over 32 years in Georgia, Angela Kidd Vinson was always known as Ms. Vinson to her students.
But in choosing her “pen name” for her long-awaited children’s book, Angela selected a very different name: Dr. Annie May. Angela does indeed hold a doctorate in education, but the “Annie May” was a to fulfill a promise.
Both Angela’s mother and grandmother inspired her love of reading and writing. Her mother enrolled her in book clubs and encouraged her to keep a diary when she was young. “My grandmother was a strong, independent woman who raised 8 children,” Angela told me. “I told myself if I ever wrote a book, I was going to use the name she always called me—Annie May.”
Angela’s dream to publish a children’s book remained on hold for over twenty years. She had written the original manuscript as part of a project for her master’s thesis in 2000. “One of the choices was to write a children’s book and I wrote about a student I had taught three years before in 1997.”
The child was named RJ and Angela was his 6th-grade teacher at Jefferson Middle School in Jefferson, Georgia. While it has been 23 years since Angela has seen or spoken to RJ, she has never forgotten him or the lessons he taught her.
When Angela first met RJ, she was a little afraid of how to teach her new student who was a quadriplegic. “I had never taught a student who was in a wheelchair or who was not able-bodied,” she explained.
Born with a lifelong disability, RJ never seemed to feel different from the other middle school students. He was always positive and became an inspiration to Angela. “He never got discouraged. I don’t know if I was in that wheelchair if I could have been that positive.”
In particular, Angela remembers one day when RJ dropped his pencil and it as an Aha! Moment. It is such a simple thing, to pick up a pencil yet we take for granted being able to retrieve something we have dropped. “RJ couldn’t lean over,” she said. “It made me start appreciating a lot of things I take for granted.”
This story of the pencil and RJ’s lessons of gratitude became the story for Angela’s master’s thesis project—but then it went into a drawer. “I didn’t know how to find an illustrator or publisher,” she said.
So, Angela forgot about her dream and her imagined author’s name until early this year when three seemingly disconnected events all coincided to bring her book to life. The first event happened in January when Angela went with girlfriends to see Oprah live onstage in Atlanta. Oprah encouraged the audience to focus on a word for the year. Angela thought about that challenge for a while. She didn’t want to just choose a word, Angela wanted it to feel a divine connection to her word. When it finally came to her, Angela didn’t know how much she would need it in 2020. The word was Courage.
Two months later in March, the second unexpected event happened when Angela found out she would need a lot of Courage. Although she had no family history, Angela was diagnosed with breast cancer. With early detection and surgery, Angela is doing well and says, “I shed my tears, but I am just grateful and thankful.”
Her brush with cancer started Angela thinking about other areas in her life where she might need Courage. And she thought about that book idea she had never acted on which is how the third unexpected event happened. Angela ran into the mom of Women I Faith & Story coach Helen Kimbrough. Helen’s mom was telling Angela all about her daughter and how proud she was that Helen had started her own business, AK Classics children’s book publishing company.
Angela got up her courage and decided to ask Helen if she would read her book. Helen loved the story and knew just how to find an illustrator to bring the story to life. This month, with Helen’s help, Angela is finally publishing the children’s book she always dreamed about and the cover will read “I Learned the Most from RJ by Dr. Annie May.”
“My goal is to write to inspire people,” Angela said. “I hope my book encourages people to do good in this world and help each other.”
Angela, the special education teacher, learned the most from RJ, and now, children and aspiring writers can learn the most from Dr. Annie May.
To buy I Learned the Most from RJ click here and to contact Angela you can email her at dranniemay@gmail.com to order a signed copy.