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 All About Art
Multi-talented Maya Angelou
published: April 2008
By Tamar Burris, Contributing Writer
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Maya Angelou is a famous poet, author, civil rights activist, and historian. She is also a singer and actress and was the first African American woman to direct a Hollywood movie!
Maya Angelou was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928. Although her real name is Marguerite Annie Johnson, her brother nicknamed her Maya when they were young. When Maya was a small child, her parents divorced, and she and her brother were sent to live with her grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. Although Maya experienced racism in Arkansas, she also had a lot of love from her extended family and says that the years with her grandmother taught her the values she lives by now.
When Maya was a young teenager, she joined her mother in San Francisco, California, where she won a scholarship to the California Labor School to study dance and drama. After graduating from high school, Maya had a very difficult life for several years. A young single mother, Maya supported her family by working as a waitress, but she never gave up on her dreams. In the early 1950s, Maya began singing at nightclubs, and her career took off! Within a few years, she had recorded her first album, and by the end of the 1950s, Maya had moved to New York City to join the Harlem Writers Guild and work as an actress.
An active member of the civil rights movement during the 1960s, Maya was deeply upset when her friend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. died. She found comfort in writing, and in 1970, Maya published her first book, an autobiography about her childhood. Her book was so successful that Maya began writing more and more! Maya eventually wrote six autobiographies and has now written almost 30 books of poetry, stories, and essays. She also wrote and directed a movie, starred in several television programs and movies and even read a poem at President Bill Clintons inauguration ceremony in 1993. And since the 1980s, Maya has also served as a professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Written by Tamar Burris, a former elementary school teacher who now works as a freelance writer and curriculum developer for PBS, the Discovery Channel and other education-related companies. Sources: Academy of Achievement, Maya Angelou Biography, www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/ang0bio-1; Maya Angelous Official Web Site, www.mayaangelou.com; Poets.org, Maya Angelou, www.poets.org.hp/prmPID/87
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