Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, was an American memoirist, essayist, poet, civil rights activist, and Broadway performer. The younger of two children of Bailey Johnson, a doorman and navy dietitian, and Vivian Johnson, a nurse and card dealer, she grew up in both St. Louis and Stamps, Arkansas, after her parents' marriage ended when she was three. Her older brother, Bailey Jr., gave her the nickname Maya, derived from "My" or "Mya Sister." Angelou died on May 28, 2014.

Her early life was marked by significant hardship. At age seven, she and her brother were returned to their mother's care in St. Louis, and at eight she was sexually abused and raped by her mother's boyfriend, a man named Freeman. After Freeman was found guilty but served only one day in jail and was subsequently murdered, Angelou became mute for nearly five years, believing her voice had caused his death. During that period of silence, she developed a deep love of books and literature and a heightened capacity for memory and observation. A teacher and family friend, Mrs. Bertha Flowers, helped her speak again by challenging her to recite poetry aloud. Flowers also introduced her to the works of Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, and several Black writers and artists, including Georgia Douglas Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Frances Harper, Anne Spencer, and Jessie Fauset.

At fourteen, Angelou moved with her brother to Oakland, California, to live with their mother. During World War II she attended the California Labor School, and at sixteen she became the first Black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco. At seventeen, three weeks after finishing school, she gave birth to her son, Clyde, who later changed his name to Guy Johnson.

Her performing career began in earnest in the early 1950s. In 1951 she married Tosh Angelos, a Greek electrician and aspiring musician, and during that period took modern dance classes, where she met Alvin Ailey and Ruth Beckford. She and Ailey formed a dance team called "Al and Rita" and performed at Black fraternal organizations throughout San Francisco. After her marriage ended in 1954, she danced and sang calypso music professionally at San Francisco clubs, including The Purple Onion, where her managers encouraged her to adopt the professional name Maya Angelou in place of Marguerite Johnson. During 1954 and 1955 she toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess. In 1957 she recorded her first album, Miss Calypso, reissued on CD in 1996, and appeared in an off-Broadway review that inspired the film Calypso Heat Wave, in which she sang and performed her own compositions.

After novelist John Oliver Killens encouraged her to focus on writing, Angelou moved to New York in 1959 and joined the Harlem Writers Guild, where she met authors including John Henrik Clarke, Rosa Guy, Paule Marshall, and Julian Mayfield, and was published for the first time. In 1960, following a meeting with Martin Luther King Jr., she and Killens organized the Cabaret for Freedom to benefit the civil rights movement. She went on to work directly with both King and Malcolm X as an active participant in the Civil Rights Movement.

On Broadway, Angelou appeared in Look Away in 1973, a credit that earned her a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play that same year.

Her literary career brought her international recognition beginning with the 1969 publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first of seven autobiographies, which chronicled her life through age seventeen. The series as a whole focuses on her childhood and early adult experiences, with recurring themes of racism, identity, family, and travel. Critics have debated whether the works constitute autobiographical fiction or autobiography, and Angelou herself made a deliberate effort to challenge and expand the conventions of the genre. Her books are widely taught in schools and universities around the world, though some U.S. libraries have attempted to ban them.

In 1982 she was named the first Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In 1993 she recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at the first inauguration of President Bill Clinton, becoming the first poet to deliver an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961. Beginning in the 1990s, she made approximately eighty appearances per year on the lecture circuit, a pace she maintained into her eighties. Over the course of her career she received dozens of awards, more than fifty honorary degrees, and published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, and multiple collections of poetry, in addition to plays, films, and television work spanning more than fifty years.