![]() ![]() Incidentally, she won a Grammy Award for the category of Best Spoken Word Album for the same piece. She made history yet again when she recited her poem, “On the Pulse of Red Morning”, back in 1993 for former President Bill Clinton’s inaugural ceremony. Her book shed light on sexual exploitation and finding one’s identity as a woman in a world full of male-dominated practices. It was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Silence Behind One of the World’s Most Powerful VoicesĪngelou’s most famous autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”, is the first best-seller by an African-American woman in the nonfiction category. She also became a professor at the Wake Forest University. She was most popular for her appearance in “Roots”, a mini television series in 1977. She was an editor, an office assistant, and finally, an actress. As she began to move forward, she began to have office-based jobs. She said she did everything she could so she could provide for herself and her son. On her dark days, as she recalled on her past interviews, she also worked as a dancer at brothels, a prostitute, and a head madam for other prostitutes. She was the first African-American female to be a streetcar conductor, after a series of failed job interviews. She danced and cooked at diners for a living. Her last marriage was with a writer and carpenter named Paul du Feu who lived in northern California.Īngelou had a lot of different jobs growing up. Angelou was also in a relationship with Vusumi Make, a South African freedom fighter who lived in Cairo. In 1952, she married a Greek sailor named Anastasios Angelopulos. She soon gave birth to a boy she named Clyde.Ĭlyde later changed his name to Guy Johnson who, eventually, also became a writer. In 1994, at the early age of 16, she was in a relationship with someone from her high school and got pregnant. Louis, Missouri in Apas Marguerite Ann Johnson. She is now known as the icon of African-American culture, women, and equality of human rights. While Angelou is most known worldwide for her autobiographies and essays, she was also successful in writing poetry and screenplays for both film and television. "By the time she became the impressive public speaker that people remember, she had lived through decades of penury, decades of various betrayals: She knew how unkind people could be, but her message in her dynamic lectures remained positive.One of the biggest literary voices in history, Maya Angelou is an African-American storyteller, poet, essayist, and civil rights activist. "People took advantage of her in the usual ways - so she had learned to be suspicious of motives," says Wagner-Martin, acknowledging all the jobs Angelou worked to support herself and her son (these included fry cook, streetcar conductor, sex worker and nightclub singer). But this was a lesson that likely reared its head many times over the course of her life. The incident scared Angelou deeply and convinced her that he was indeed as ornery as he had proclaimed himself. ![]() Weeks later, he purposely stopped on railroad tracks while Angelou was in his car, taking off just in time to narrowly miss an approaching train. In context, Angelou was referring to a man named Phil, who told her that he was ornery and a crazy liar when they first met. This quote appeared in Angelou's sixth autobiography, "A Song Flung Up to Heaven," which chronicles her life between 19. Let's delve deeper into the life of this renowned author, using five of the best Maya Angelou quotes. "Maya Angelou reminds us all of our better selves," says Wagner-Martin. "I am the dream and the hope of the slave," said Jackson, referencing a line in Angelou's poem "Still I Rise." Linda Wagner-Martin, author of the books " Maya Angelou: Adventurous Spirit" and " The Life of the Author: Maya Angelou," notes that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson quoted Angelou at the White House after her recent Supreme Court confirmation. media without hitting one of the late author's quotes.ĭr. ![]() Angelou's words are so resonant that you can't throw a stone in U.S. She earned dozens of honorary degrees a Presidential Medal of Freedom and a legacy that has endured via class curricula, contemporary Black feminist writers and even internet memes. The success of that first memoir spurred Angelou to write six more autobiographies, in addition to three books of essays, several books of poetry, plays, screenplays and even two cookbooks. ![]()
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