Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Ann Johnson on April 4, 1928), is an American memoirist and poet. She has been called "America's most visible black female autobiographer". She is best known for her series of six autobiographies. The first, best-known, and most highly acclaimed, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, (1969), brought her international recognition and was nominated for a National Book Award. Her volume of poetry, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Diiie (1971) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Angelou has had a long and varied career, holding jobs such as fry cook, dancer, actress, journalist, educator, television producer, and film director. She was a member of the Harlem Writers Guild in the late 1950s. She was active in the Civil Rights movement, and served as Northern Coordinator of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King's assassination inspired her to write her first autobiography. Since 1991, Angelou has taught at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, as recipient of the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies. In 1993, she recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at President Bill Clinton's inauguration, the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy's in 1961. Since the 1990s, Angelou has had a busy career on the lecture circuit, making about 80 appearances a year. Angelou has been highly honored for her body of work, including being awarded over 30 honorary degrees. In 1995, she was recognized for having the longest-running record (two years) on The New York Times Paperback Nonfiction Bestseller List.

With the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou was heralded as a new kind of memoirist, one of the first African American women who was able to publicly discuss her personal life. She became recognized and highly respected as a spokesperson for blacks and women. Angelou's use of fiction-writing techniques often result in the placement of her books into the genre of autobiographical fiction, but they are better characterized as autobiographies. Angelou has made a deliberate attempt in her books to challenge the common structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre. Although her books have been used extensively in the classroom, they have also been challenged or banned in schools and libraries. Her books and poetry have covered themes such as identity, family, and racism.

Maya Angelou was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928 to Bailey Johnson, a doorman and naval dietitian, and Vivian (Baxter) Johnson, a real estate agent, trained surgical nurse, and later a merchant marine. Angelou's brother, Bailey Jr., gave her the nickname "Maya". The details of Angelou's life, although described in her six autobiographies and in numerous interviews, speeches, and articles, tend to be inconsistent. Her biographer, Mary Jane Lupton, explains that when Angelou speaks about her life, she does so eloquently but informally and "with no time chart in front of her".

In 2008, Angelou's family history was profiled on the PBS series African American Lives 2. A DNA test showed that she was descended from the Mende people of West Africa. The program's research showed that Angelou's maternal great-grandmother, Mary Lee, emancipated after the Civil War, cut all ties with her slave past and renamed herself "Kentucky Shannon" because "she liked how it sounded". Little was known about Lee's background because she prohibited anyone from knowing about it. Lee became pregnant by her former owner, a white man named John Savin, who forced Lee to sign a false statement accusing another man of being the father. A grand jury indicted Savin for forcing Lee to commit perjury, and despite discovering that Savin was the father, found him not guilty. Lee was sent to the Clinton County, Missouri poorhouse with her daughter, who became Angelou's grandmother, Marguerite Baxter. Angelou's reaction after learning this information was, "That poor little black girl, physically and mentally bruised."
William Shakespeare, whom Angelou "met and fell in love with" as a child.

Angelou's first book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, recounts the first 16 years of her life. When Angelou was three and her brother four, their parents' "calamitous marriage" ended, and their father sent them alone by train to live with his mother, Annie Henderson, in Stamps, Arkansas. Henderson prospered financially during this time, the years of the Great Depression and World War II, because the general store she owned sold basic commodities and because "she made wise and honest investments". Four years later, the children's father "came to Stamps without warning" and returned them to their mother's care in St. Louis. At age eight, while living with her mother, Angelou was sexually abused and raped by her mother's boyfriend, Mr. Freeman. She confessed it to her brother, who told the rest of their family. Freeman was found guilty, but was jailed for one day. Four days after his release, he was found kicked to death, probably by Angelou's uncles. Angelou became mute, believing, as she has stated, "I thought, my voice killed him; I killed that man, because I told his name. And then I thought I would never speak again, because my voice would kill anyone..." She remained nearly mute for five years.

Angelou and her brother were sent back to their grandmother once again. Angelou credits Bertha Flowers, a friend and teacher, with helping her speak again and introducing her to classical literature and authors. These authors include Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Douglas Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson, as well as black female artists like Frances Harper, Anne Spencer, and Jessie Fauset. When Angelou was 13, she and her brother returned to live with her mother in San Francisco, California; during World War II, she attended George Washington High School and studied dance and drama on a scholarship at the California Labor School. Before graduating, she worked as the first black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco. Three weeks after completing school, she gave birth to her son, Clyde, who also became a poet. At the end of Angelou's third autobiography, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, her son announced that he wanted to be called "Guy Johnson" and trained his friends and family to accept it.

Angelou's second autobiography, Gather Together in My Name, recounts her life from age 17 to 19. As Lupton states, this book "depicts a single mother's slide down the social ladder into poverty and crime." Angelou made her living working in various jobs, most notably as a prostitute and as the madame of a brothel. In those years, Angelou went through a series of relationships, occupations, and cities as she attempted to raise her son without the benefit of job training or advanced education. Lupton states, "Nevertheless, she was able to survive through trial and error, while at the same time defining herself in terms of being a black woman." Angelou learned how to perform professionally for live audiences, and exhibited a natural dancing ability and talent.

Angelou won a scholarship to study dance with Trinidadian choreographer Pearl Primus and married Greek sailor Tosh Angelos in 1952; the marriage ended in divorce after one-and-a-half years. Angelou tends not to admit how many times she has been married, "for fear of sounding frivolous", although it has been at least three times. Known by "Rita Johnson" up to that point, she changed her name when her managers at San Francisco nightclub The Purple Onion strongly suggested that she adopt a "more theatrical" name that captured the feel of her Calypso dance performances. She co-created a dance team, "Al and Rita", with choreographer Alvin Ailey, who combined elements of modern dance, ballet, and West African tribal dancing. She toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess in 1954–1955, studied modern dance with Martha Graham, danced with Ailey on television variety shows, and recorded her first record album, Miss Calypso, in 1957. Angelou's third autobiography, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, covered her early dancing and singing career. One of the themes of this book was the conflict she felt between her desire to be a good mother and a successful performer, a situation "very familiar to mothers with careers".
Paperback book cover illustration, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

By the end of the 1950s, Angelou moved to San Diego, California, where she performed in plays and met artists and writers active in the Civil Rights Movement. From 1959 to 1960, Angelou held the position of Northern Coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at the request of Martin Luther King, Jr. In the early 1960s, Angelou briefly lived with South African freedom fighter Vusumzi Make; she moved with him and her son Guy to Cairo, Egypt, where she became an associate editor at the weekly newspaper The Arab Observer. In 1962, her relationship with Make ended, and she and Guy moved to Ghana. She became an assistant administrator and instructor at the University of Ghana's School of Music and Drama, was a feature editor for The African Review, and acted and wrote plays. In her travels Angelou learned French, Spanish, and Fante.

Angelou became close friends with Malcolm X in Ghana and returned to the US in 1964 to help him build a new civil rights organization, the Organization of African American Unity; he was assassinated shortly afterward. In 1968, King asked her to organize a march, but he too was assassinated, on her birthday (April 4) in 1968. She did not celebrate her birthday for many years for that reason; she sent flowers to King's widow, Coretta Scott King, every year until King's death in 2006. Inspired by a meeting with her friend James Baldwin, cartoonist Jules Feiffer, and Feiffer's wife Judy, she dealt with her grief by writing her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which brought her international recognition and acclaim.[
In 1973, Angelou married Paul du Feu, a British-born carpenter and remodeler, and moved with him and her son to Sonoma, California. The years to follow were some of Angelou's most productive years as a writer and poet. She composed music for movies, wrote articles, short stories, and poetry for several magazines, continued to write autobiographies, produced plays, lectured at universities throughout the country, and served on various committees. She appeared in a supporting role in the television mini-series Roots in 1977, wrote for television, and composed songs for Roberta Flack. Her screenplay, Georgia, Georgia, was the first original script by a black woman to be produced. It was during this time, in the late '70s, that Angelou met Oprah Winfrey when Winfrey was a TV anchor in Baltimore, Maryland; Angelou became Winfrey's friend and mentor in 1984.

Angelou divorced de Feu and returned to the southern United States in 1981, where she accepted the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In 1993, she recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at President Bill Clinton;s inauguration, the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. Also in 1993, Angelou's poems were featured in the Janet Jackson/John Singleton film Poetic Justice, in which Angelou also made a brief appearance.
Maya Angelou, reciting her poem, "On the Pulse of Morning", at President Bill Clinton's inauguration in 1993

Since the 1990s, Angelou has been a busy participant in the lecture circuit. In 1993, she was making about 80 speaking appearances a year; in 2008, she charged approximately US$43,000 per engagement. In 1997, over 2,000 tickets were sold when she spoke at the Woman's Foundation in San Francisco. Her most common speaking engagements occur on college campuses, "where seating is sold out long before the actual event." When Angelou speaks, she sits on a stool and entertains the audience for approximately one hour, reciting poems by memory and following a flexible outline. By the early 2000s, Angelou traveled to her speaking engagements and book tour stops by tour bus. She "gave up flying, unless it is really vital ... not because she was afraid, but because she was fed up with the hassle of celebrity".

Starting in March 1999, a poem called "Clothes" that was attributed to Angelou circulated on the Internet. The poem makes a number of false and defamatory claims labeling various clothing manufacturers (such as FUBU, Timberland, and Eckō lines) as racists and/or members of the KKK. Angelou has denied on her website that she wrote the poem. In 2002, Angelou lent her name and writings to a line of products from the Hallmark Greeting Card Company. Also in 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Maya Angelou on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.

In 2006, Angelou became a radio talk show host for the first time, hosting a weekly show for XM Satellite Radio's Oprah & Friends channel. Also in 2006, singer Nancy Wilson set Angelou's poem "My Life Has Turned to Blue" to music in the title track of her CD, "Turned to Blue". In 2007, she became the first African-American woman and living poet to be featured in the Poetry for Young People series of books from Sterling Publishing.

In 1998, Angelou went on her first cruise, a gift of her friend Winfrey, in celebration of her 70th birthday. Over 150 people were in attendance. In April 2008, Angelou had three parties to celebrate her 80th birthday. A "pricey soiree" that included a red carpet and "a guest list of celebrities" was held in Atlanta, Georgia to benefit a YMCA youth center named after her. There was also a city-wide event celebrated by Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and Winfrey hosted "an extravagant 80th birthday celebration" at Donald Trump's Mar-A-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. She was serenaded by Tony Bennett, Natalie Cole, Jessye Norman, and Ashford & Simpson. Angelou spent part of her 80th year studying religion; in 2005, she attended a Unity Church service in Miami, Florida and decided that day to "go into a kind of religious school and study" on her 80th birthday.

Angelou became involved in US presidential politics in 2008 by placing her public support behind Senator Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, despite her good friend Winfrey's public support of Barack Obama. When Clinton's campaign ended, Angelou put her support behind Obama. When Obama won the election and became the US' first African American president, she stated, ""We are growing up beyond the idiocies of racism and sexism".
Although Angelou did not write her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, with the intention of writing a series of autobiographies, she went on to write five additional volumes, covering her young adult experiences. They are distinct in style and narration, but unified in their themes and "stretch over time and place", from Arkansas to Africa and back to the US, occurring in time from the beginnings of World War II to King's assassination. Like Caged Bird, the events in these books are episodic and crafted like a series of short stories, but do not follow a strict chronology. Later books in the series include 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), and A Song Flung Up To Heaven (2002). Critics have tended to judge Angelou's subsequent autobiographies "in light of the first", with Caged Bird receiving the highest praise. Angelou has used the same editor throughout her writing career, Robert Loomis, an executive editor at Random House, who has been called "one of publishing's hall of fame editors." Angelou has said regarding Loomis: "We have a relationship that's kind of famous among publishers".
Maya Angelou's plaque at San Francisco's Jack Kerouac Alley.

All my work, my life, everything is about survival. All my work is meant to say, 'You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated'". --Maya Angelou

Angelou's long and extensive career also includes poetry, plays, screenplays for television and film, directing, acting, and public speaking. She is a prolific writer of poetry; her volume Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Diiie (1971) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and she was chosen by President Bill Clinton to recite her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" during his inauguration in 1993.

Angelou has had a successful career as a playwright and actress. In 1977, she appeared in a supporting role in the television mini-series Roots. Her screenplay, Georgia, Georgia (1972), was the first original script by a black woman to be produced. In 2008, Angelou wrote poetry for and narrated the M. K. Asante, Jr. film The Black Candle. She is one of the most honored writers of her generation, earning an extended list of honors and awards, as well as over thirty honorary degrees.

When I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was published in 1969, Angelou was hailed as a new kind of memoirist, one of the first African American women who was able to publicly discuss her personal life. Up to that point, black female writers were marginalized to the point that they were unable to present themselves as central characters. Writer Julian Mayfield, who calls Caged Bird "a work of art that eludes description", insists that Angelou's autobiographies set a precedent not only for other black women writers, but for the genre of autobiography as a whole. Through the writing of her autobiography, Angelou had become recognized and highly respected as a spokesperson for blacks and women. It made her "without a doubt, ... America's most visible black woman autobiographer".

Author Hilton Als insists that although Caged Bird was an important contribution to the increase of black feminist writings in the 1970s, he attributes its success less to its originality than with "its resonance in the prevailing Zeitgeist", or the time in which it was written, at the end of the American Civil Rights movement. Als also insists that Angelou's writings, more interested in self-revelation than in politics or feminism, freed many other female writers to "open themselves up without shame to the eyes of the world". An Angelou biographer, Joanne M. Braxton, insists that Caged Bird was "perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing" autobiography written by an African-American woman in its era.

Angelou's books, especially I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, has been criticized by many parents, causing their removal from school curricula and library shelves. According to the National Coalition Against Censorship, parents and schools have objected to Caged Bird's depictions of lesbianism, premarital cohabitation, pornography, and violence. Some have been critical of the book's sexually explicit scenes, use of language, and irreverent religious depictions. Caged Bird appears third on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000. It is fifth on the ALA's list of the ten most challenged books of the 21st century (2000–2005), and is one of the ten books most frequently banned from high school and junior high school libraries and classrooms.

The week after Angelou recited her poem, "On the Pulse of Morning", at President Bill Clinton's 1993 inauguration, sales of the paperback version of her books and poetry rose by 300-600%. Bantam Books had to reprint 400,000 copies of all her books to keep up with the demand. Random House, which published Angelou's hardcover books and published the poem later that year, reported that they sold more of her books in January 1993 than they did in all of 1992, accounting for a 12,000% increase.

Angelou's autobiographies have been used in narrative and multicultural approaches in teacher education. Jocelyn A. Glazier, a professor at George Washington University, has used I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Gather Together in My Name to train teachers how to "talk about race" in their classrooms. Due to Angelou's use of understatement, self-mockery, humor, and irony, readers of Angelou's autobiographies wonder what she "left out" and are unsure about how to respond to the events Angelou describes. Angelou's depictions of her experiences of racism force white readers to explore their feelings about race and their own "privileged status". Glazier found that although critics have focused on where Angelou fits within the genre of African-American autobiography and on her literary techniques, readers react to her storytelling with "surprise, particularly when [they] enter the text with certain expectations about the genre of autobiography".

Educator Daniel Challener, in his 1997 book, Stories of Resilience in Childhood, analyzed the events in Caged Bird to illustrate resiliency in children. Challener insists that Angelou's book provides a "useful framework" for exploring the obstacles many children like Maya face and how a community helps these children succeed as Angelou did. Psychologist Chris Boyatzis has reported using Caged Bird to supplement scientific theory and research in the instruction of child development topics such as the development of self-concept and self-esteem, ego resilience, industry versus inferiority, effects of abuse, parenting styles, sibling and friendship relations, gender issues, cognitive development, puberty, and identity formation in adolescence. He finds the book a "highly effective" tool for providing real-life examples of these psychological concepts.