Maya Angelou

Marguerite Annie Johnson was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, on the fourth of April 1928. She was raised principally by her grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas, after her parents' divorce. She was raped by her mother's boyfriend at the age of eight, identified the man to her family, and — when he was found murdered shortly after his release from a one-day jail sentence — did not speak for the next five years, on the conclusion that her voice had killed him. The autobiography of these years, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), established her as one of the foundational memoirists of twentieth-century American letters.

She produced six further volumes of autobiography, twenty volumes of poetry, several plays and screenplays, and a body of essays and addresses across five decades. She danced professionally with Alvin Ailey; she was the Northern Coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference under Martin Luther King; she lived for several years in Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah and edited The African Review; she taught for the last thirty years of her life at Wake Forest University as Reynolds Professor of American Studies.

She read "On the Pulse of Morning" at the first inauguration of Bill Clinton on the twentieth of January 1993 — the first inaugural poem since Robert Frost in 1961, and the first ever delivered by a Black woman. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2010.

She died in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on the twenty-eighth of May 2014, age eighty-six.

She is honored here as the memoirist whose first book gave a generation of Black girls their voice.