Maya Angelou 1928 -

Angelou has been a cook, a dancer, a singer, and an actress. She has collaborated with musicians Branford Marsalis, Roberta Flack, and Quincy Jones. She had a leading role in the 1996 film How to Make an American Quilt. She has done segments for Sesame Street and has written books for children.

In all of these activities she has been aware of the phenomenal power of the rhythm of words. She has the ability to capture a voice on the printed page, as in the title of her verse collection Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie, but the strange phenomenon is that expressing the particulars of one experience can also open up a understanding of other experience. She has the rhythms from black experience, yet William Shakespeare was her first "white love."

Angelou explained this herself in an interview with George Plimpton in the Paris Review: "In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats--maybe it's imperative that we encounter the defeats--but we are much stronger than we appear to be, and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be."

Her Life:Her life story is best expressed by a description of her best-selling autobiographies. Please see the descriptions next.

Her Books:

In this first of five volumes of autobiography, poet Maya Angelou recounts a youth filled with disappointment, frustration, tragedy, and finally hard-won independence.

Sent at a young age to live with her grandmother in Arkansas, Angelou learned a great deal from this exceptional woman and the tightly knit black community there. These very lessons carried her throughout the hardships she endured later in life, including a tragic occurrence while visiting her mother in St. Louis and her formative years spent in California--where an unwanted pregnancy changed her life forever.

Marvelously told, with Angelou's "gift for language and observation," this "remarkable autobiography by an equally remarkable black woman from Arkansas captures, indelibly, a world of which most Americans are shamefully ignorant."

Gather Together in My Name begins when Angelou is seventeen and a new mother. It describes a destructive love affair, Angelou's work as a prostitute, her rejection of drug addition, and the kidnaping of her son.

Maya Angelou continues her stunning autobiography. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, passionate and mellow, she fills the pages with both wisdom and wonder as she brings us along in her struggle and dance through life.

"a heroic and beautiful book." -- Cleveland Plain Dealer.

"This is the story of a great heroine who knows the meaning of a struggle and never loses her pride or dignity. Indeed, her story makes me proud of the human race." -- John Oliver Killens

As the book opens, Maya, in order to support herself and her young son, gets a job in a record shop run by a white woman. Suspicious of almost any kindness shown her, she is particularly confused by the special attentions of a young white customer. Soon the relationship grows into love and then marriage, and Maya believes a permanent relationship is finally possible. But it is not to be, and she is again forced to look for work.

Her remarkable talent, soon brings her attention and before long she is singing in one of the most popular nightclubs on the coast. From there, she is called to New York to join the cast of "Porgy and Bess", which is just about to begin another tour abroad. The troupe's joyous and dramatic adventure through Italy, France, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Egypt becomes the centerpiece of the book. This remarkable portrayal of one of the most exciting and talented casts ever put together, and of the encounters between these larger-than-life personalities and audiences who had rarely seen black people before, makes a hilarious and poignant story. The excitement of the journey -- full of camaraderie, love affairs, and memorable personalities -- is dampened only by Maya's nagging guilt that she has once again abandoned the person she loves most in life, her son.

Back home, and driven close to suicide by her guilt and concern, she takes her son with her to Hawaii, where she discovers that devotion and love, in spite of forced absence, have the power to heal and sustain. As always, Maya Angelou's writing is charged with that remarkable sense of life and love and unique celebration of the human condition that have won her such a loyal following.

In the fourth volume in Angelou's highly acclaimed autobiography, Maya Angelou leaves California with her son, Guy, to go to New York. There she enters the society and world of black artists and writers. Not since her childhood has she lived in an almost black environment, and she is surprised at the obsession her new friends have with the white world around them. She stays for a while with John and Grace Killens and begins to read her writing at the Harlem Writers Guild. She continues to sing, most notably at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, but more and more she begins to take part in the struggle of black Americans for their rightful place in the world. She helps organize a benefit cabaret for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and then is appointed Martin Luther King's Northern Coordinator.

Shortly after that, through her friend Abbey Lincoln, she takes one of the lead parts in Genet's "The Blacks" (it was a remarkable cast, including Godfrey Cambridge, Roscoe Lee Brown, James Earl Jones, Cicely Tyson, Raymond St. Jacques, and Lou Gossett), and even writes music for the production.

The Heart of a Woman is filled with unforgettable vignettes of famous people, from Billie Holiday to Malcolm X, but perhaps most important is the story of Maya Angelou's relationship with her son. Because this book chronicles, finally, the joys and the burdens of a black mother in America and how the son she had cherished so intensely and worked for so devotedly finally grows to be a man.

This engaging book chronicles the changes in Maya Angelou's life as she enters the hub of activity that is New York. There, at the Harlem Writers Guild, she rededicates herself to writing, and finds love at an unexpected moment. Reflecting on her many roles--from northern coordinator of Martin Luther King's history-making quest to mother of a rebellious teenage son--Angelou eloquently speaks to an awareness of the heart within us all.

"I know that not since the days of my childhood, when people in books were more real than the people one saw every day, have I found myself SO moved." -- James Baldwin

Once again, the poet casts her spell as she resumes one of the greatest personal narratives of our time. In this continuation, Angelou relates how she joins a "colony" of Black American expatriates in Ghana--only to discover no one ever goes home again.

"Thoroughly enjoyable. . . An important document drawing more much-needed attention to the hidden history of a people both African and American." --Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Maya Angelou regards the world and herself with intelligence and wit; she records the events of her life with style and grace." --Washington Post Book World

"Angelou's journey into Africa is a journey into herself, into that part of every Afro-American's soul that is still wedded to Africa, that still yearns for a home." --Chicago Tribune Book World

Her Poetry:

"Maya Angelou, one of the best-loved authors of our time, shares the wisdom of a remarkable life in this best-selling spiritual classic. This is Maya Angelou talking from the heart, down to earth and real, but also inspiring. This is a book to treasured, a book about being in all ways a woman, about living well, about the power of the word, and about the power do spirituality to move and shape your life. Passionate, lively, and lyrical, Maya Angelou's latest unforgettable work offers a gem of truth on every page."