Maya Angelou

Playwright, Author

1928 –

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Who is Maya Angelou?

Maya Angelou is an American author and poet. She has published seven autobiographies, five books of essays, and several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning more than fifty years. She has received dozens of awards and over thirty honorary doctoral degrees. Angelou is best known for her series of autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, tells of her life up to the age of seventeen, and brought her international recognition and acclaim.

Angelou's list of occupations includes pimp, prostitute, night-club dancer and performer, castmember of the opera Porgy and Bess, coordinator for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, author, journalist in Egypt and Ghana during the days of decolonization, and actor, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs. Since 1982, she has taught at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she holds the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies. She was active in the Civil Rights movement, and worked with both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Since the 1990s she has made around eighty appearances a year on the lecture circuit, something she continued into her eighties. In 1993, Angelou recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at President Bill Clinton's inauguration, the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961.

Famous Quotes:

  • The need for change bulldozed road down the center of my mind.
  • I believe that every person is born with talent.
  • If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love. Don't be surly at home, then go out in the street and start grinning Good morning at total strangers.
  • I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.
  • A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning's greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.
  • A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.
  • Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.
  • All of childhood's unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.
  • Something made greater by ourselves and in turn that makes us greater.
  • Education helps one case cease being intimidated by strange situations.

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Born
Apr 4, 1928
St. Louis
Also known as
  • Dr. Maya Angelou
  • Marguerite Ann Johnson
  • Marguerite Annie Johnson
  • Angelou, Maya
  • Dr Maya Angelou
  • Dr. Angelou
  • Marguerite Johnson
  • Maya
  • Rita
Parents
Siblings
Spouses
Children
Ethnicity
  • African American
  • Mende people
Nationality
  • United States of America
Profession
Education
  • George Washington High School
  • California Labor School
Employment
  • Wake Forest University
Lived in
  • St. Louis
  • San Francisco

Submitted
on July 23, 2013

Citation

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"Maya Angelou." Biographies.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 Mar. 2024. <https://www.biographies.net/people/en/maya_angelou>.

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