Download Maya Angelou biography

Maya Angelou – Biography
Dr. Maya Angelou is one of the most renowned and influential voices of our time. Hailed as a global
renaissance woman, Dr. Angelou is a celebrated poet, memoirist, novelist, educator, dramatist,
producer, actress, historian, filmmaker, and civil rights activist.
Born on April 4th, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, Dr. Angelou was raised in St. Louis and Stamps,
Arkansas. In Stamps, Dr. Angelou experienced the brutality of racial discrimination, but she also
absorbed the unshakable faith and values of traditional African-American family, community, and
culture.
The first 17 years of Angelou's life are documented in her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged
Bird Sings. When Angelou was three, and her brother four, their parents' "calamitous marriage"
ended. Their father sent them to Stamps, Arkansas alone by train to live with his mother, Annie
Henderson. Henderson prospered financially during the Great Depression and World War II
because the general store she owned sold needed basic commodities and because "she made wise and
honest investments". Four years later, the children's father "came to Stamps without warning, and
returned them to their mother's care in St. Louis. At age eight, while living with her mother, Angelou
was sexually abused and raped by her mother's boyfriend, Mr. Freeman. She confessed it to her
brother, who told the rest of their family. Freeman was found guilty, but was jailed for one day. Four
days after his release, he was found kicked to death, probably by Angelou's uncles. Angelou became
mute, believing, as she has stated, "I thought, my voice killed him; I killed that man, because I told his
name. And then I thought I would never speak again, because my voice would kill anyone...” She
remained mute for nearly five years. Shortly after Freeman's murder, Angelou and her brother were
sent back to their grandmother once again.
Angelou credits a teacher and friend of her family, a Mrs. Bertha Flowers, with helping her speak
again. Flowers introduced her to authors such as Dickens, Shakespeare, Poe, Douglas Johnson, and
James Weldon Johnson, as well as Black female artists like Frances Harper, Anne Spencer, and Jessie
Fauset. When Angelou was 13, she and her brother returned to live with her mother in San
Francisco. During World War II, she attended George Washington High School, then studying dance
and drama on a scholarship at the California Labor School. At 14 she dropped out and worked as the
first Black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco. She later finished high school, and three
weeks after its completion, she gave birth to her son, Clyde, who also became a poet.
In 1954 and 1955, Dr. Angelou toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess. She
studied modern dance with Martha Graham, and co-created a dance team combining elements of
modern dance, ballet, and West African dance with the now famous choreographer, Alvin Ailey. She
danced with Alvin Ailey on television variety shows and, in 1957, recorded her first album, Calypso
Lady. In 1958, she moved to New York, where she joined the Harlem Writers Guild, acted in the
historic Off-Broadway production of Jean Genet's The Blacks and wrote and performed Cabaret for
Freedom.
In 1960, Dr. Angelou moved to Cairo, Egypt where she served as editor of the English language
weekly The Arab Observer. The next year, she moved to Ghana where she taught at the University of
Ghana's School of Music and Drama, worked as feature editor for The African Review and wrote for
The Ghanaian Times. During her years abroad, Dr. Angelou read and studied voraciously, mastering
French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and the West African language Fanti. While in Ghana, she met with
Malcolm X and, in 1964, returned to America to help him build his new Organization of African
American Unity.
Shortly after her arrival in the United States, Malcolm X was assassinated, and the organization
dissolved. Soon after X's assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. asked Dr. Angelou to serve as
Northern Coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King's assassination, falling
on her birthday in 1968, left her devastated. With the guidance of her friend, the novelist James
Baldwin, she began work on the book that would become I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Published
in 1970, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was published to international acclaim and enormous
popular success. The list of her published verse, non-fiction, and fiction now includes more than 30
bestselling titles.
In 1973, Angelou married Paul du Feu, a British-born carpenter and remodeler, and moved to
Sonoma, California with him. The years to follow were some of Angelou's most productive as a
writer and poet. She worked as a composer, writing for singer Roberta Flack and composing movie
scores. She wrote articles, short stories, TV scripts, autobiographies and poetry, produced plays, and
spoke on the university lecture circuit. In 1977 Angelou appeared in a supporting role in the
television mini-series Roots. Her screenplay, Georgia, Georgia, was the first original script by a Black
woman to be produced. In the late '70s, Angelou met Oprah Winfrey when Winfrey was a TV anchor
in Baltimore, Maryland; Angelou would later become Winfrey's close friend and mentor. Angelou
divorced de Feu and returned to the southern United States in 1981, where she accepted the first
lifetime Reynolds Professorship 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 inauguration of President Bill Clinton,
becoming the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy's
inauguration in 1961. Angelou was the first African American woman to direct a major motion
picture, Down in the Delta, in 1998, at the age of seventy. She has also served on two presidential
committees, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Arts in 2000, the Lincoln Medal in 2008, and has
received 3 Grammy Awards.
-The biographical information above was taken from the following websites:
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www.wikipedia.org
www.mayaangelou.com