Maya Angelou: Women’s Rights Activist and Author of World Wide Poems

Maya Angelou, original name Marguerite Annie Johnson, was born April 4, 1928, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S. Angelou passed on May 28, 2014; she was an American writer, memoirist, and histrion whose many volumes of life explore the themes of economic, racial, and sexual oppression. Although she was born in St. Louis, Angelou spent abundant of her childhood within the care of her paternal grandparents in rural Stamps, Arkansas. However eight years previous, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend and once he was murdered; the traumatic sequence of events left her nearly fully mute for many years. This adolescence is the focus of her initial autobiographical work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, that gained an important acclaim and a National Book Award nomination. Later volumes of life embrace Gather Along in My Name, Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas, The Guts of a Lady, All God’s Youngsters want Traveling Shoes, A Song Flung Up to Heaven, and Female Parent & Amp; Pine Tree State; female parent. In 1940 Angelou moved together with her mother to port of entry and worked intermittently as a cocktail waiter, a prostitute and madam, a cook, and a dancer. It had been as a dancer that she assumed her skilled name. Moving to the big apple town within the late Fifties, Angelou found encouragement for her literary skills at the Harlem Writers’ club. Concerning identical time, Angelou landed a featured role in a very State Department-sponsored production of martyr Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess; with this organisation she toured twenty two countries in Europe and the continent. She conjointly studied dance with Graham and Pearl Primus. In 1961 she performed in Jean Genet’s play The Blacks. that very same year she was persuaded by a South African dissident to whom she was in brief married to maneuver to Cairo, wherever she worked for the Arab Observer. She later moved to Ghana and worked on The African Review.

Angelou came to California in 1966 and wrote Black, Blues, Black which aired 1968, a 10-part TV series concerning the role of African culture in yank life. because the author of the flick drama Georgia, Georgia in 1972, she became one in all the primary African yank girls to own a book created as a picture show. She conjointly acted in such movies as final result and the way to form Associate in Nursing yank Quilt and appeared in many TV productions, together with the miniseries Roots. Angelou received a Tony Award nomination for her performance in look, despite the actual fact that the play closed on street once just one performance. In 1998 she created her directorial debut with Down within the Delta. The documentary Maya Angelou and “Still I Rise” depicts her life through interviews with Angelou and her intimates and admirers. Angelou’s poetry, collected in such volumes as simply provide Pine Tree State a Cool Drink of Water ’fore I Die in 1971, And Still I Rise in 1978, currently Sheba Sings the Song in 1987, and that I Shall Not Be Moved in 1990, histrion heavily on her personal history however used the points of read of assorted personae.

She conjointly wrote a book of meditations, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey in 1993, and children’s books that embrace My Painted House, My Friendly Chicken and Pine Tree State in 1994, Life Doesn’t Frighten Pine Tree State in 1998, and also the Maya’s series, that was revealed in 2004–05 and featured stories of youngsters from varied elements of the globe. Angelou distributed anecdote-laden recommendation to girls in Letter to My female offspring in 2008; her solely biological kid was male. In 1981 Angelou, United Nations agency was typically noted as “Dr. Angelou” despite her lack of a school education, became an academic of American studies at Wake Forest University, urban center, North Carolina. Among varied honours was her invite to compose and deliver a literary composition, “On the Heartbeat of Morning,” for the inauguration of U.S. Pres. William Jefferson Clinton in 1993. She celebrated the fiftieth day of the UN within the literary composition “A Brave and surprising Truth” in 1995 and elegized salon in the poem “His Day Is Done” in 2013, that was commissioned by the U.S. State Department and free within the wake of the South African leader’s death. In 2011 Angelou was awarded the Presidential decoration of Freedom.