Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1928, and grew up partly in Stamps, Arkansas, in her grandmother's store, in a segregated town she wrote about as both a shelter and a lesson. She worked as a dancer, a calypso singer, an actor, a journalist in Cairo and Accra, and an organiser alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Her first book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), changed what American memoir was permitted to say, and she went on to write six more volumes of autobiography. She was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for her screenplay Georgia, Georgia, received the National Medal of Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and read her poem 'On the Pulse of Morning' at a presidential inauguration in 1993. She taught for thirty years at Wake Forest University and died in 2014. The tradition and place she wrote from She wrote from the Black American South of the 1930s: a store that sold flour on credit and kept a ledger of who owed what, a church, a schoolroom, a grandmother's authority. Behind that stands a wider Black Atlantic - the calypso she sang in New York clubs, the years in Cairo and Accra, the civil rights movement she worked inside. Her material is memory, and she treats memory as evidence. Genres and style Memoir above all, and poetry written for the ear: short lines, repetition, a public voice that can be spoken aloud in a hall. Her essays and speeches work the same way. Her style joins plain speech to elevated cadence - a sentence you could say to a neighbour, built into a line you would stand up to hear. Notable works I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981), All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002) and Mom & Me & Mom (2013); the poems 'Caged Bird', 'Still I Rise' and 'Phenomenal Woman'; 'On the Pulse of Morning', read at the 1993 inauguration; and the essay collections, including Letter to My Daughter (2008). What her craft can teach yours Two things above all. First, that the plainest sentence can carry the largest feeling when its rhythm is right - Angelou writes for the ear before the eye. Second, that a writer may turn a private wound to public use without handing over what must stay private. She chose what to tell and when to tell it, which is craft rather than confession. Her memoirs also show how an ordinary object - a ledger, a dress, a bus ticket - can carry a whole period of history if it is placed precisely. What Makes This Writing Special? Her writing moves at the pace of a voice speaking to a room. The repetition is not decoration: 'Still I Rise' works by saying no, and rising, and saying no again, so that the reader's body starts keeping time with the argument. The imagery stays domestic and physical - dust, hands, flour, doors, the caged bird's small climb - and the abstractions only arrive once the picture is complete. In the memoirs the same principle holds: a scene is built from what a child could see and hear, and the meaning is left for the reader to reach. Resilience in her work is therefore a rhythm rather than a slogan, and a rhythm is something a reader can borrow. Experience Their Writing Her work remains in copyright, so no passage is reproduced here - a substantial poem by a writer who died in 2014 belongs to her estate, and a profile is not the place to borrow it. Listen instead. 'Still I Rise', 'Phenomenal Woman' and 'Caged Bird' are widely recorded in her own reading voice, and hearing her read is the quickest way to understand the cadence on the page. The opening pages of the first memoir are also available as a publisher's extract, which is enough to hear how a five-year-old's point of view is controlled by an adult writer. Where to Read More I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and the later memoirs are in print from her publishers and widely held by public libraries; The Complete Collected Poems gathers the poetry. The Poetry Foundation and the Academy of American Poets both keep a profile of her with biography and selected poems, and the Library of Congress holds the recording of the 1993 inaugural poem. Recordings of her readings are held by libraries and archives, and are the best introduction to her voice.