Maya Angelou

2 Pages 397 Words

Maya Angelou was born on April 4, 1928
as Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis. She grew up in segregated rural Arkansas. She is a poet, historian, author, actress, playwright, civil rights activist, producer and director. She lectures throughout the U.S. and abroad and is Reynolds professor of American studies at Wake Forest University in North Carolina since 1981. She has written ten best selling books and numerous magazine articles earning her Pulitzer prize and national book award nominations. Maya, wrote and delivered a poem at President Clinton’s 1993 Presidential Inauguration. Dr. Angelou who speaks french and three other languages began her career in drama and dances. Maya got married to a south African freedom fighter and lived in Cairo where she was the editor of the Arab observer, the only English language news weekly in the Middle East. In the 1960's at the request of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,


Maya Angelou became Northern Coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Maya, 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. She held the great hall audience spellbound with stories of her own childhood. She ranged from story, to poem, to song and back again. “The honorary duty of a human being is to love” Angelou said. She spoke of her early love for William Shakespeare’s work’s, and offered her audience excerpts from the poems of several African Americans, including James Weldon Johnson and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. But she came back to love and humanity. In the sixties she became the northern coordinator for the southern christian leadership conference and in 1975 she received the ladies home journal woman of the year award in communications. Maya is on the board of the American film institute and is one of the few female members of the director’s guild. She has written ...