Whirligigs: The Wondrous Windmills of Vollis Simpson's Imagination [Hardcover]

2025 Best STEM Book Winner
2025 Notable Children’s Books in the Language Arts

Take a journey through the creative process that led folk artist Vollis Simpson to create his wonderful and whimsical wind-powered whirligigs and more in this STEAM/STEM picture book written by Children's Literature Legacy Award winner Carole Boston Weatherford.

Vollis Simpson was a man with a curious mind—always eager to know how things worked and how to fix them. Growing up on a farm in North Carolina, he loved to tinker with machines. And when he served in the Army Air Corps during WWII, Vollis kept right on tinkering. His ingenuity allowed him to build things no one would have thought to create from scraps—a washing machine out of airplane parts and a motorcycle out of a bike.

After the war, his passion for metal creations picked up speed—turning into a whirlwind of windmills as far as the eye could see. Luckily, Vollis’s fanciful and colorful windmills have been preserved at a park in Wilson, NC, where visitors can behold his magnificent and towering creations forever whizzing in the air.A Bank Street Best Book 2025
A NSTA-CBC Best STEM Book
2025 Kansas NEA Reading Circle List

“Weatherford conveys the joyful obsession and dedication that fueled Simpson’s creative endeavors. Fotheringham’s cheerful, cartoonish illustrations capture the energy of Simpson’s work… This illuminating biography of a mechanic-turned-folk-artist brings his whirligigs to clanking, stirring life.”—Kirkus Reviews

Offering an opportunity to appreciate the boundlessness of human creativity, [Whirligigs] is a story about a figure who refused to call himself an ar