Profile: Maya Angelou

Born: April 4, 1928 as Marguerite Ann Johnson

Nationality: United States

Magnum Opus: Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘Fore I Die (1971)

Influences: Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Edger Allan Poe, James Weldon Johnson, Frances Harper, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Anne Spencer, and Jessie Faucet

How she started: At a young age, Miss Johnson was a dancer. She changed her name because it didn’t capture her Calypso dance performances. Then, she toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess (she played Ruby). Maya Angelou danced on TV variety shows and recorded an album titled, “Miss Calypso”. She moved to San Diego to act in off-Broadway productions where she met active members in the Civil Rights Movement. She held the position of Northern Coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at the request of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. After, then moved to Cairo, Egypt and was an associate editor for the weekly newspaper, “The Arab Observer”. She later moved to Ghana and became an assistant administrator at the University of Ghana’s School of Music and Drama while being a feature editor for “The African Review”. She met Malcolm X while in Ghana and returned to the US to help build a new Civil Rights organization, the Organization of African American Unity. After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated (on her birthday, no less), she dealt with the grief by writing her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which gave her international recognition and acclaim.

Writing Ritual: Maya Angelou gets up at 5 o’clock in the morning, checks into a hotel room (where there is no pictures on the wall) and writes on legal pads while laying in bed drinking a bottle of sherry, playing solitaire with a deck of cards, and with a Roget’s Thesaurus and the Bible before leaving in the afternoon. She averages 12 pages per day, but edits them to 3 or 4 in the evening.

Accomplishments:

• National Book Award for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
• Pulitzer Prize nomination for Just Give Me A Cool Drink of Water ‘Fore I Die.
• Tony Award nomination for acting in Look Away.
• 3 Grammys for her spoken word albums.
• She served on 2 presidential committees.
• Presidential Medal of Arts (2000).
• Lincoln Medal (2008).
• 30 honorary degrees.