Maya Angelou

“I can be changed by what happens to me. but I refuse to be reduced by it.”

Maya Angelou whose name was originally Marguerite (some sources say Marguerita) Johnson; surname is pronounced “An-ge-lo”; born April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri. By the time she was in her early twenties, Maya Angelou had been a Creole cook, a streetcar conductor, a cocktail waitress, a dancer, a madam, and an unwed mother. The following decades saw her emerge as a successful singer, actress, and playwright, an editor for an English-language magazine in Egypt, a lecturer and civil rights activist, and a popular author of five collections of poetry and five autobiographies.Angelou is hailed as one of the great voices of contemporary black  literature and as a remarkable Renaissance woman. She began producing books after some notable friends, including author James Baldwin, heard Angelou’s stories of her childhood spent shuttling between rural, segregated Stamps, Arkansas, where her devout grandmother ran a general store, and St. Louis, Missouri, where her worldly, glamorous mother lived. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a chronicle of her life up to age sixteen (and ending with the birth of her son, Guy) was published in 1970 with great critical and commercial success.

Bio Courtesy of Aalbc.com

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