Maya Angelou

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Standard Name: Angelou, Maya
Birth Name: Marguerite Annie Johnson
Married Name: Angelos
Nickname: Maya
Self-constructed Name: Maya Angelou
MA overcame the unpromising circumstances of her birth and upbringing to become an African-American poet, song-writer, autobiographer, and political activist, a talented Renaissance woman of the twentieth-century United States.
Younge, Gary. “Maya Angelou: a titan who lived as though there were no tomorrow”. The Guardian.
Colour photo of Maya Angelou speaking at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She is sitting, talking away from the microphone on her right, wearing a black dress with gold chain and disc earrings, hands clasped in her lap.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Education Malorie Blackman
MB was shaped by her reading outside school. She never entered a bookshop until she was fourteen, but relied on libraries. Early favourites were C. S. Lewis 's Narnia books, Johanna Spyri 's Heidi books...
Education Meiling Jin
She was saved by the public Children's Library. She read omnivorously, beginning with the Dr Doolittle books (Hugh Lofting ) and fairy stories but missing out on Enid Blyton (who was kept locked away)...
Family and Intimate relationships Germaine Greer
The relationship was conducted on antagonistic, sparring lines both before and after the wedding. Since Greer was mostly resident in Leamington Spa (because of her job at Warwick University) and du Feu in London, they...
Intertextuality and Influence Meiling Jin
In the introduction to the book of poems that was her first publication, MJ noted that poetry was a form of expression that comes easier to me than most others. This state of affairs was...
Publishing Maud Sulter
MS had approached Virago Press , a feminist publisher, but was told that they could not give her a decision about including her in their poetry series. They were awaiting the results of negotiations with...
Reception Zora Neale Hurston
The volume was reprinted in London two years later. Larry Neal provided an introduction in 1971, Robert Hemenway in 1984, and poet Maya Angelou in 1991.
Library of Congress Online Catalog.
Textual Production Toni Morrison
TM spoke, along with Maya Angelou , Amiri Imamu , and the French ambassador, at the funeral of writer James Baldwin at the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York.
American National Biography.
under Baldwin
Textual Production Grace Nichols
The collection features black writers from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Britain and the USA, including Edward Kamau Brathwaite , Zinziswa Mandela , Maya Angelou , and Rabindranath Tagore , alongside traditional and folk poems.
Blackwell’s Online Bookshop.
Hedblad, Allan, editor. Something About the Author 98. Gale Research, 1998.
125

Timeline

28 August 1963
Martin Luther King gave his famous I have a dream . . .
King, Martin Luther, and Gary Younge. I have a dream. Guardian News and Media, 2007.
10
speech to more than 200,000 people at a peaceful Freedom March in Washington, DC.