Maya Angelou

As a child, Maya Angelou stopped speaking for almost five years. At 8 she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend and told her family. The man was killed soon after his release, and she became convinced that her voice had killed him. Back in Stamps, Arkansas, a family friend, Mrs. Flowers, helped her speak again, giving her Dickens, Shakespeare and Poe and telling her: “You do not love poetry, not until you speak it.”

She lived many lives before she wrote. At 16 she became the first Black woman streetcar conductor in San Francisco. She sang calypso in a nightclub, where she took the stage name Maya Angelou, and toured Europe with a production of Porgy and Bess. In the 1960s she worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), the first of her seven autobiographies, covers her life up to the age of 17. It made her famous, and it is also one of the most challenged books in American schools and libraries. Her first poetry collection, in 1971, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993 she read “On the Pulse of Morning” at Bill Clinton’s inauguration, the first poet to do so since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy’s in 1961.

Start with And Still I Rise (1978), a short collection, then read the first volume of her autobiography. Maya Angelou died in 2014. Since 2022 her portrait has appeared on a US quarter.