Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou was an American writer, poet, and civil rights activist. She lived from 1928 to 2014. She is best known for her book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which tells the story of her own childhood. She wrote seven books about her life, plus many poems, essays, and plays. She is one of the most loved American writers of the twentieth century.

She was born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri. Her older brother could not say "Marguerite," so he called her "My" or "Maya." The name stuck. When her parents split up, Maya and her brother were sent to live with their grandmother in a small town in Arkansas. Their grandmother ran a country store and helped raise them during the years of the Great Depression.

Maya's childhood had hard moments. When she was about seven, a man badly hurt her. She felt so afraid of her own voice that she stopped speaking for almost five years. During those silent years, she read everything she could find. A teacher named Mrs. Flowers helped her fall in love with poetry and helped her speak again. Maya later said that being silent for so long is what made her listen so closely to the world.

As a young woman, she worked many jobs. She was San Francisco's first Black female cable car conductor when she was just sixteen. Later she worked as a singer, dancer, actress, and journalist. She lived in Egypt and Ghana for several years and wrote for African newspapers.

In the 1960s, she became part of the civil rights movement. She worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. King was killed on her 40th birthday. For years afterward, she could not celebrate her birthday at all.

In 1969, she published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The book was honest about racism, poverty, and the harm she had survived as a child. It became one of the first books by a Black woman to reach the top of the bestseller lists. It also became one of the most banned books in American schools, because some adults thought it was too painful for young readers.

In 1993, Angelou read her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton. Millions of people watched. She kept writing, teaching, and speaking until she died at age 86. President Barack Obama gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor a civilian can receive in the United States.