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Caged Bird Legacy | The Legacy of Dr. Maya Angelou

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We are celebrating Maya Angelou's 95th year, which started on her Birthday on April 4th, 2023. Join the celebration here and on social media, and watch as others honor Dr. Angelou's courage, life, and legacy.

Maya Angelou becomes 1st Black woman featured on US quarters

The legendary author and poet, who died in 2014, is the first featured in a series of new quarters issued by the U.S. Mint.

The United States Mint recently began shipping quarters featuring the image of poet Maya Angelou, the first coins in its American Women Quarters Program.

Angelou, an American author, poet and civil rights activist, rose to prominence with the publication of "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" in 1969. Angelou, who died in 2014 at the age of 86, was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2010 by President Barack Obama.

The quarter design depicts Angelou with outstretched arms. Behind her are a bird in flight and a rising sun, images inspired by her poetry.

The mint's program will issue 20 quarters over the next four years honoring women and their achievements in shaping the nation's history.

Honoring the legacy of world-renowned poet, author and civil rights leader, Dr. Maya Angelou.

The Dr. Maya Angelou Foundation is dedicated to improving the quality of life for all human beings. Our vision is to support educational excellence and healthcare equity initiatives for all.

Alone Together - an intimate portrait of a world in lockdown. With voiceover by Dr.Maya Angelou's son, Guy Johnson.

Maya Angelou's Alone is a poem about loneliness and togetherness, a 'thinking out loud' reflection on vulnerability and community 'Nobody, but nobody, can make it out here alone.' Though written in 1975, it clearly resonates with the alone/together experiences we've all lived through during the pandemic.

We mourn the loss of Robert Loomis, Maya Angelou's friend and editor of her books including "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"

Celebrating Dr. Maya Angelou's 95th Birthday

This April 4th, we are excited to celebrate 95 years of the life and legacy of Dr. Maya Angelou! We will celebrate her entire 95th year with different in-person and virtual events and will share special stories and Angelou facts online from now until March 2024. Follow Dr. Maya Angelou on Facebook , Instagram , Twitter , and YouTube , and sign up to receive upcoming newsletters for more.

Today's #GoogleDoodle celebrates Dr. Maya Angelou's 90th birthday! Set to her poem #StillIRise, the video Doodle includes her own voice along with the voices of other individuals whose lives she has inspired.

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We celebrate the re-release of I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, with a foreword by "daughter-friend" Oprah Winfrey. We celebrate a book that changed the nation and eventually the world by giving a young black girl a voice, once lost then freed to sing the song of all people.
PURCHASE THIS BOOK TODAY "

MESSAGE FROM THE FAMILY

Developing a love of truth, standing for civil rights, enjoying life itself and recording the experience, our matriarch became an inspiration. Maya Angelou's words, spoken, on the printed page or reflected here, continue to promote self-examination, equality and friendship. Believing that "we are more alike than unalike", Maya Angelou would be the first to say that as a child of God it was her duty to recognize that everyone else was also a child of God, "Everybody born comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory."

Join us as we celebrate a life well lived! Take time to read, listen, view and be inspired. Trail your wisps of glory and once you've clicked every page, make sure you return as we continue to expand the experience. Together, let's celebrate life and joy!

The Angelou Johnson Family

CMG Worldwide

CMG pioneered representation for deceased celebrities through our legal expertise and created an opportunity for a deceased celebrity's heirs to retain rights. With over 200 celebrities, it has the largest portfolio of legends to this day. There can be no substitute for experience and skill in the licensing world. CMG's position as the industry leader gives an advantage that other agencies are simply not able to match.

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Maya Angelou | Maya Angelou - Caged Bird Legacy

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Maya Angelou, an American author, poet and civil rights activist, rose to prominence with the publication of "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" in 1969...

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Maya Angelou: Legacy Beyond Poetry | Rock & Art

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Discover the timeless wisdom and inspiring legacy of Maya Angelou. Explore her life, poetry, and activism in our latest article. Click now to find out!

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An acclaimed American poet, storyteller, activist, and autobiographer, Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri. Angelou had a broad career as a singer, dancer, actress, composer, and Hollywood's first female black director, but became most famous as a writer, editor, essayist, playwright, and poet. As a civil rights activist, Angelou worked for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. She was also an educator and served as the Reynolds professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University. By 1975, wrote Carol E. Neubauer in Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, Angelou was recognized "as a spokesperson for... all people who are committed to raising the moral standards of living in the United States." She served on two presidential committees, for Gerald Ford in 1975 and for Jimmy Carter in 1977. In 2000, Angelou was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Bill Clinton. In 2010, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the U.S., by President Barack Obama. Angelou was awarded over 50 honorary degrees before her death.

Angelou's most famous work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), deals with her early years in Long Beach, St. Louis and Stamps, Arkansas, where she lived with her brother and paternal grandmother. In one of its most evocative (and controversial) moments, Angelou describes how she was first cuddled then raped by her mother's boyfriend when she was just seven years old. When the man was murdered by her uncles for his crime, Angelou felt responsible, and stopped talking. Angelou remained mute for five years, but developed a love for language. She read Black authors like Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar, as well as canonical works by William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe. When Angelou was twelve and a half, Mrs. Flowers, an educated African American woman, finally got her to speak again. Mrs. Flowers, as Angelou recalled in her children's book Mrs. Flowers: A Moment of Friendship (1986), emphasized the importance of the spoken word, explained the nature of and importance of education, and instilled in her a love of poetry. Angelou graduated at the top of her eighth-grade class.

Angelou attended George Washington High School in San Francisco and took lessons in dance and drama on a scholarship at the California Labor School. When Angelou, just seventeen, graduated from high school and gave birth to a son, Guy, she began to work as the first African American and first female street car conductor in San Francisco. As she explained in Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry like Christmas (1976), the third of her autobiographies, she also "worked as a shake dancer in night clubs, fry cook in hamburger joints, dinner cook in a Creole restaurant and once had a job in a mechanic's shop, taking the paint off cars with my hands." Angelou married a white ex-sailor, Tosh Angelos, in 1950. After they separated, Angelou continued her study of dance in New York City, returning to San Francisco to sing in the Purple Onion cabaret and garnering the attention of talent scouts. From 1954 to 1955, she was a member of the cast of a touring production of Porgy and Bess. During the late 1950s, Angelou sang in West Coast and Hawaiian nightclubs, before returning to New York to continue her stage career.

Angelou joined the Harlem Writers Guild in the late 1950s and met James Baldwin and other important writers. It was during this time that Angelou had the opportunity to hear Dr. Martin Luther King speak. Inspired by his message, she decided to become a part of the struggle for civil rights. She was offered a position as the northern coordinator for Dr. King's SCLC. Following her work for Dr. King, Angelou moved to Cairo with her son, and, in 1962, to Ghana in West Africa. She worked as a freelance writer and was a feature editor at the African Review. When Angelou returned to the United States in the mid-1960s, she was encouraged by author James Baldwin and Robert Loomis, an editor at Random House, to write an autobiography. Initially, Angelou declined the offers, but eventually changed her mind and wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The book chronicles Angelou's childhood and ends with the birth of her son. It won immediate success and was nominated for a National Book Award.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the first of Angelou's six autobiographies. It is widely taught in schools, though it has faced controversy over its portrayal of race, sexual abuse and violence. Angelou's use of fiction-writing techniques like dialogue and plot in her autobiographies was innovative for its time and helped, in part, to complicate the genre's relationship with truth and memory. Though her books are episodic and tightly-crafted, the events seldom follow a strict chronology and are arranged to emphasize themes. Other volumes include Gather Together in My Name (1974), which begins when Angelou is seventeen and a new mother; Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry like Christmas, an account of her tour in Europe and Africa with Porgy and Bess; The Heart of a Woman (1981), a description of Angelou's acting and writing career in New York and her work for the civil rights movement; and All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), which recounts Angelou's travels in West Africa and her decision to return, without her son, to America.

It took Angelou fifteen years to write the final volume of her autobiography, A Song Flung up to Heaven (2002). The book covers four years, from the time Angelou returned from Ghana in 1964 through the moment when she sat down at her mother's table and began to write I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in 1968. Angelou hesitated so long to start the book and took so long to finish it, she told Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service interviewer Sherryl Connelly, because so many painful things happened to her, and to the entire African-American community, in those four years. "I didn't know how to write it," she said. "I didn't see how the assassination of Malcolm [X], the Watts riot, the breakup of a love affair, then [the assassination of Dr.] Martin [Luther] King [Jr.], how I could get all that loose with something uplifting in it." A Song Flung up to Heaven deals forthrightly with these events, and "the poignant beauty of Angelou's writing enhances rather than masks the candor with which she addresses the racial crisis through which America was passing," Wayne A. Holst wrote in Christian Century.

Angelou was also a prolific and widely-read poet, and her poetry has often been lauded more for its depictions of Black beauty, the strength of women, and the human spirit; criticizing the Vietnam War; demanding social justice for all-than for its poetic virtue. Yet Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie, which was published in 1971, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1972. According to Carol Neubauer in Southern Women Writers, "the first twenty poems describe the whole gamut of love, from the first moment of passionate discovery to the first suspicion of painful loss." In other poems, "Angelou turns her attention to the lives of black people in America from the time of slavery to the rebellious 1960s. Her themes deal broadly with the painful anguish suffered by blacks forced into submission, with guilt over accepting too much, and with protest and basic survival."

As Angelou wrote her autobiographies and poems, she continued her career in film and television. She was the first Black woman to have a screenplay ( Georgia, Georgia) produced in 1972. She was honored with a nomination for an Emmy award for her performance in Roots in 1977. In 1979, Angelou helped adapt her book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, for a television movie of the same name. Angelou wrote the poetry for the 1993 film Poetic Justice and played the role of Aunt June. She also played Lelia Mae in the 1993 television film There Are No Children Here and appeared as Anna in the feature film How to Make an American Quilt in 1995.

One source of Angelou's fame in the early 1990s was President Bill Clinton's invitation to write and read an inaugural poem. Americans all across the country watched as she read "On the Pulse of Morning," which begins "A Rock, a River, a Tree" and calls for peace, racial and religious harmony, and social justice for people of different origins, incomes, genders, and sexual orientations. It recalls the civil rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous "I have a dream" speech as it urges America to "Give birth again / To the Dream" of equality. Angelou challenged the new administration and all Americans to work together for progress: "Here, on the pulse of this new day, / You may have the grace to look up and out / And into your sister's eyes, and into / Your brother's face, your country /And say simply / Very simply / With hope-Good morning."

During the early 1990s, Angelou wrote several books for children, including Life Doesn't Frighten Me (1993), which also featured the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat; My Painted House, My Friendly Chicken, and Me (1994), and Kofi and His Magic (1996), both collaborations with the photographer Margaret Courtney-Clark. Angelou's poetry collections include The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (1994) and Phenomenal Woman (1995), a collection of four poems that takes its title from a poem which originally appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1978. The poem's narrator describes the physical and spiritual characteristics and qualities that make her attractive. Angelou also wrote occasional poems, including A Brave Startling Truth (1995), which commemorated the founding of the United Nations, and Amazing Peace (2005), a poem written for the White House Christmas tree-lighting ceremony.

Angelou published multiple collections of essays. Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now (1993) contains declarations, complaints, memories, opinions, and advice on subjects ranging from faith to jealousy. Genevieve Stuttaford, writing in Publishers Weekly, described the essays as "quietly inspirational pieces." Anne Whitehouse of the New York Times Book Review observed that the book would "appeal to readers in search of clear messages with easily digested meanings." Even the Stars Look Lonesome (1997) is the sister volume, a book of "candid and lovingly crafted homilies" to "sensuality, beauty, and black women" said Donna Seaman in Booklist. Letter to my Daughter was published in 2008.

Angelou's poetry often benefited from her performance of it, and during her lifetime Angelou recited her poems before spellbound crowds. Indeed, Angelou's poetry can also be traced to African-American oral traditions like slave and work songs, especially in her use of personal narrative and emphasis on individual responses to hardship, oppression and loss. In addition to examining individual experience, Angelou's poems often respond to matters like race and sex on a larger social and psychological scale. Describing her work to George Plimpton, Angelou said, "Once I got into it I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass-the slave narrative-speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I meaning 'we.' And what a responsibility. Trying to work with that form, the autobiographical mode, to change it, to make it bigger, richer, finer, and more inclusive in the twentieth century has been a great challenge for me."

In 2013 she was the recipient of the Literarian Award, an honorary National Book Award for contributions to the literary community. She died in 2014 at the age of 86.

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An acclaimed American poet, storyteller, activist, and autobiographer, Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri. Angelou had a broad career as a singer, dancer, actress, composer, and Hollywood's first female black director, but became most famous as a writer, editor,...

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Discover 15 powerful Maya Angelou poems that have made a lasting impact on literature and culture, showcasing her iconic voice and influence.

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Literary Writing Style of Maya Angelou - Literary Devices

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Maya Angelou used everyday language, African-American dialect and rhetorical techniques. Know everything you need about Maya Angelou’s writing style.

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Maya Angelou, through her powerful writings, has inspired generations of women, African Americans and all people who struggle to overcome prejudice, discrimination and abuse.

Throughout her life, Angelou has defied social norms. After being raped by her mother's boyfriend, she withdrew and was mute for five years. However, encouraged by her grandmother, who introduced her to literature, she gradually emerged as a talented artist.

Angelou was a Renaissance woman on many levels, treating life as a smorgasbord to be fully experienced then reporting it to inspire others to reach beyond damaging stereotypes. Her
seven volumes of autobiography entail a remarkable life in the arts, diplomacy, travel, and activism.

In 1954, Angelou turned to acting before she started writing while also working as northern coordinator and fund raiser for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In the 1960s, Angelou began to focus on her writing and, in 1970, her first autobiographical work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, became a best seller and was nominated for a National Book Award.

Angelou's writings have altered society for the better, bringing greater diversity into the theater and literature. Her autobiographical works provide powerful insights into the evolution of black women in the 20th century. In 1971, she became the first black woman to have a screenplay produced as a film - Georgia, Georgia. Her writings have brought her numerous awards and have been nominated for a Tony Award, an Emmy Award and a Pulitzer Prize.

Maya Angelou, died in 2014

Year Honored: 1998

Birth: 1928 - 2014

Born In: Missouri

Achievements: Arts

Educated In: California, United States of America

Schools Attended: Mission High School, San Francisco's Labor School
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Angelou, Maya - National Women's Hall of Fame

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Maya Angelou, through her powerful writings, has inspired generations of women, African Americans and all people who struggle to overcome prejudice, discrimination and abuse. Throughout her life, Angelou has defied social norms. After being raped by her mother's boyfriend, she withdrew and was mute for five years.

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Maya Angelou (originally Marguerite Annie Johnson) was born on April 4, 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri. Due to a tumultuous and difficult childhood, Angelou stopped speaking for five years. When she began to speak again, she was in high school and excelled in her studies of dance and drama. During her senior year, she got pregnant and became a single mother.

In 1952, she married Anastasios Angelopulos. Around the same time, she became a nightclub singer and took on the professional name of Maya Angelou. Her marriage did not last, but her career soared. She composed song lyrics and poems for several years and eventually moved to New York joining the Harlem Writers Guild. It was here that she took her place amongst numerous young black writers associated with the Civil Rights Movement. For many years, she travelled abroad honing her writing skills and strengthening her propensity for political activism.

In 1964, Angelou returned to America and began her work with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Upon his assassination in 1968, she turned to writing to deal with her grief. And so began what would become a critically acclaimed success, her book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, chronicling her childhood.

Angelou became a national figure. Her increasing popularity and notoriety, led her to teach and lecture. She also wrote the screenplay and composed the score for the film Georgia, Georgia (1972), which was the first by an African American woman to ever be filmed and went on to subsequently be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Angelou received several invitations from successive Presidents of the United States, such as Presidents Ford, Carter and Clinton, to serve in various roles.

In 2000, Angelou received the Presidential Medal of the Arts. In 2008, she received the Ford's Theatre Lincoln Medal. In 2011, President Barack Obama awarded her the highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Angelou published over 30 titles and received over 50 honorary degrees during her career. Angelou died on May 28, 2014.

Source used:

Maya Angelou biography. (May 2014). Retrieved from http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/ang0bio-1

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Maya Angelou | Social Activist | Hilbert College

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Maya Angelou (originally Marguerite Annie Johnson) was born on April 4, 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri. Due to a tumultuous and difficult childhood, Angelou stopped speaking for five years. When she began to speak again, she was in high school and excelled in her studies of dance and drama.