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Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Johnson on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis was raised in segregated rural Arkansas. She is a poet, historian, author, actress, playwright, civil-rights activist, producer and director. She lectures throughout the United States and abroad and has been the Reynolds professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in North Carolina since 1981. She has published ten best selling books and numerous magazine articles earning her Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominations. In 1993, Angelou gave a moving reading of her poem, On the Pulse of Morning, at Bill Clinton's presidential inauguration, an occasion that gave her wide recognition.
Dr. Angelou, who speaks French, Spanish, Italian and West African Fanti, began her career in drama and dance. She married a South African freedom fighter and lived in Cairo where she was editor of The Arab Observer, the only English-language news weekly in the Middle East. In Ghana, she was feature editor of The African Review and taught at the University of Ghana. In the 1960's, at the request of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ms. Angelou became the northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She was appointed by President Gerald Ford to the Bicentennial Commission and by President Jimmy Carter to the National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year.
Maya Angelou was among the first African-American women to hit the bestsellers lists with her I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a chronicle of her life up to age sixteen (and ending with the birth of her son), which was published in 1970 with great critical and commercial success. Although many of the stories in the book are grim, as in the author's revelation that she was raped at age eight by her mother's boyfriend, the volume also recounts the self-awakening of the young Angelou. "Her genius as a writer is her ability to recapture the texture of the way of life in the texture of its idioms, its idiosyncratic vocabulary and especially in its process of image-making," reports Sidonie Ann Smith in Southern Humanities Review.
In the film industry, through her work in script writing and directing, Maya Angelou has been a groundbreaker for black women. In television, she has made hundreds of appearances. Her best-selling autobiographical account of her youth, I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings, won critical acclaim in 1970 and was a two-hour TV special on CBS. She has written and produced several prize-winning documentaries, including "Afro-Americans in the Arts," a PBS special for which she received the Golden Eagle Award. She was also nominated for an Emmy Award for her acting in "Roots," and her screenplay Georgia, Georgia, which was the first by a black woman to be filmed. In theatre, she produced, directed and starred in "Cabaret for Freedom" in collaboration with Godfrey Cambridge at New York's Village Gate; starred in Genet's "The Blacks" at St Mark's Playhouse; and adapted Sophocles' "Ajax," which premiered in Los Angeles in 1974.
Maya Angelou is hailed as one of the great voices of contemporary black literature and as a remarkable Renaissance woman. A mesmerizing vision of grace, swaying and stirring when she moves, Dr. Angelou captivates her audiences lyrically with vigor, fire and perception. Through her books of poetry and her autobiographies, She has the unique ability to shatter the opaque prisms of race and class between reader and subject.
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