Maya Angelou

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DR. MAYA ANGELOU

Dr. Maya Angelou is a poet, educator, historian, best-selling author, memoirist, actress, playwright, civilrights activist, producer and director. She is known as one of the great voices of contemporary literature.

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Life as Dr. Maya Angelou

She was born on April 4th, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, Dr. Angelou was raised in St. Louis and Stamps, Arkansas. In Stamps, Dr. Angelou experienced the brutality of racial discrimination, but she also absorbed the unshakable faith and values of traditional African-American family, community, and culture.

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As a teenager, Dr. Angelous love for the arts won her a scholarship to study dance and drama at San Franciscos Labor School. At 14, she dropped out to become San Franciscos first African-American female cable car conductor. She later finished high school, giving birth to her son, Guy, a few weeks after graduation.
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Guy Johnson, is an author himself. "It is my desire to be a great writer. I know that I still have a mountain to climb to achieve that. With this first novel, I am just above the foothills, but I see the path to the top, and it is my desire to write compelling stories about everything that I find of interest. I hope to be with you as a writer for a very long time, and I hope that you will enjoy reading my work, because readers are the highest form of life on this planet."
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"Truthfully, while I have been writing since I was 18, I didn't know that I wanted to be a writer. I thought I was going to be a painter and sketcher. Then I thought I was going to be a photographer. I tried a hand at darkroom technician. I played in a band. It took me quite some time to discover that I wanted to write. The great thing about being the son of Maya Angelou is that I had the good fortune to grow up around some of the greatest black artists, dancers, singers, musicians, and actors of our time. 4/15/12

In 1954 and 1955, Dr. Angelou toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess. She studied modern dance with Martha Graham, danced with Alvin Ailey on television variety shows and, in 1957, recorded her first album, Calypso Lady. In 1958, she moved to New York, where she joined the Harlem Writers Guild, acted in the historic Off-Broadway production of Jean Genet's The Blacks and wrote and performed Cabaret for Freedom.
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Shortly after her arrival in the United States, Malcolm X was assassinated, and the organization dissolved. Soon after X's assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King asked Dr. Angelou to serve as Northern Coordinator for the Sothern Christian Leadership Conference. King's assassination, falling on her birthday in 1968, left her devastated. Dr. Angelou has served on two presidential committees, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Arts in 2000, the Lincoln Medal in 2008, and has received 3 Grammy 4/15/12 Awards. President Clinton requested that

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Angelou and Langston Hughes

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