Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou is best known for writing six autobiographical testaments to her years as a child and young adult growing up in the South. Her most highly acclaimed work was her first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which she published in 1969. The book’s vivid and emotional accounting of the first 17 years of Angelou’s life brought her recognition around the world and was nominated for a National Book Award. But prior to ever publishing a book, Angelou was an important contributor to society and the arts, first as a member of the Harlem Writers Guild in the 1950s and later by participating in the Civil Rights movement. She served as the Northern Coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Angelou has been heralded for her body of work, and has been given more than 30 honorary degrees at prestigious colleges around the country. In 1971 she was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for her poetry anthology titled Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘Fore I Diiie. Since the 1990s Angelou has made regular appearances on the lecture circuit, visiting as many as 80 cities a year. In 1993 she was the first poet to issue an inaugural recitation since John F. Kennedy, when she recited "On the Pulse of Morning," as part of President Bill Clinton’s inauguration ceremonies. In 1995, she received recognition for having a book on The New York Times Paperback Nonfiction Bestseller List for two years running, which was the longest amount of time since the creation of the list.

Born Marguerite Ann Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, Angelou has been hailed as one of the first black women who has been strong enough to discuss her personal life in public. Although her work is sometimes called autobiographical, most scholars call it "autobiographical fiction" because the details among her various volumes tend to be somewhat inconsistent. However, Mary Jane Lupton, an official biographer of Angelou, explains that when Angelou speaks about her life she does it "with no time chart in front of her," and therefore details may vary from one telling to the next.

In her first book, Angelou relates how her parents divorced when she was three years old. She and her brother were sent alone by train to live with their grandmother, who owned a general store. Four years later, their father appeared unexpectedly and took the children back to live with their mother in St. Louis. While living with her mother, Angelou was raped by Mr. Freeman, one of her mother’s boyfriends. She was eight years old. When she told her brother about it, he told the rest of the family and Freeman was charged, tried, and found guilty. Yet he was jailed for only one day before being released. But four days later his body was found, and he had been kicked to death - probably by the children’s uncles.

The traumatic events resulted in Angelou becoming almost entirely mute. She has stated that she thought her voice had killed that man, because she spoke his name and said what he had done. So she resolved not to speak again because she believed her voice could kill anyone, and she did not speak for five years. However, a friend of her family, Mrs. Bertha Flowers, helped her emerge from her cocoon and find her voice again. Flowers, a teacher, introduced her to respected authors such as Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, and James Weldon Johnson, in addition to black female artists including Anne Spencer, Frances Harper, and Jessie Fauset.

Without Flowers’ intervention, Angelou might never have been able to tell her stories and become one of the most powerful voices for women’s rights and civil rights. She has, through her work, deliberately attempted to challenge the traditional structure of autobiographies by expanding the genre to include more narrative fiction. Her works are centered around themes such as family, finding one’s identity, and racism, and they are often used by as classroom texts by schools around the world. However, Angelou has at times been seen as a polarizing figure, and some of her more controversial books have been banned by schools and libraries around the country.

Maya Angelou is currently teaching at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.