You’ve said that society’s view of the black woman is such a threat to her well-being that she will die daily unless she determines how she sees herself. He is, she says, her “monument in the world.” And there is Angelou’s son, Guy Johnson, 57, author of Echoes of a Distant Summer and one other novel. He remained a source of support throughout her life until his death more than a year ago. Believing she had caused the killing because she had told of the rape, Angelou refused to speak for several years only her beloved older brother, Bailey, could coax her to talk. The man was arrested, convicted and released soon after, he was found beaten to death. Louis, her mother’s boyfriend raped Angelou. When Angelou was 8 and briefly living with Baxter in St. She was an inadvertent player in an early, formative trauma in Angelou’s life. Angelou lived most of her childhood with her grandmother, whom she called “Momma.” Angelou’s sometimes-absentee mother, Vivian Baxter, had a steel will and several careers of her own. Her grandmother Annie Henderson was one of the most important, a pious woman who ran a general store in Stamps, Arkansas. Our conversation often returned to the loved ones who helped her triumph over the tragedies of her childhood and made her believe she could meet whatever challenge life threw in her path. And there is little sign of her slowing down.īut when we met recently in her art-filled home in Winston- Salem, it was her family, not her varied career, that she most wanted to discuss. She is constantly on the lecture circuit and a regular guest on talk shows she recently created a line of greeting cards for Hallmark. Angelou is the Reynolds Professor of American Studies at North Carolina’s WakeForestUniversity in Winston-Salem. as a journalist in Egypt and Ghana as a writer for television and Hollywood as director of the 1998 film Down in the Delta. Less well known are Angelou’s other lives: as a singer as a composer as a dancer in Porgy and Bess as an actor in the Obie-winning play The Blacks and in films such as Calypso Heat Wave and How to Make an American Quilt as a civil rights worker with Martin Luther King, Jr. Kennedy- invited to compose an inaugural poem. history-Robert Frost was the first, for John F. She wrote “On the Pulse of Morning” for the 1993 swearing-in of President Bill Clinton, becoming only the second poet in U. Her works have earned her more than 30 honorary degrees as well as nominations for a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. In February, she won a Grammy for the recorded reading of her most recent memoir, A Song Flung Up to Heaven. She is best known as a writer, for her numerous books of poetry and her six poignant memoirs, including the masterful 1969 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Turning 75 this month, Maya Angelou has led many lives.
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