Maya Angelou passed away on at the age of 86. She had one son, two grandsons, and two great-grandchildren. Later in life, Angelou divided her time between Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and Harlem, New York. She was the recipient of the National Medal of Arts in 2000 and the Lincoln Medal in 2008. The recipient of a Tony Award nomination for her role in the 1973 Broadway play Look Away, Angelou was granted three Grammy Awards for her spoken word albums and an Emmy for her supporting role in the television miniseries 'Roots.' In 1998, Angelou was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. In 1993, she recited her poem 'On the Pulse of Morning' at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton. In 1981, Angelou returned to the South, where she became the Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Angelou’s first volume of poetry, 'Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Diiie,' was published in 1971, and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize the next year. This persons opinion had a huge impact on Maya herself, and the crowd. Maya describes how she feels after listening to someone else opinion on her and the rest of African Americans of her graduating class at that time. This autobiography was followed by five other volumes, released in 1974, 1976, 1981, 1986, and 2002. In Maya Angelous story, Graduation, she discusses her eighth-grade graduation. In 1970, Angelou published her famed autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, for which she received a National Book Award nomination. Unfortunately, when Malcolm died, so too did the organization. Angelou returned to the United States in 1964 to help Malcolm X build the Organization of African American Unity. In 1961, Angelou moved to Cairo, where she wrote for the weekly newspaper, 'The Arab Observer', then to Ghana, where she taught at the University of Ghana's School of Music and Drama and worked as a feature editor for 'The African Review'. Around the same time, she served as the Northern Coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) under Dr. From 1954 to 1955, Angelou toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess, and three years later, she moved to New York City in order to concentrate on her writing career.

Three weeks after her graduation, she gave birth to her only son.Īround 1950, Angelou, then a calypso dancer, changed her name from Marguerite Johnson to the more theatrical Maya Angelou. During World War II, Angelou attended George Washington High School and San Francisco’s Labor School, dropping out for a short while to work as the first Black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco, but eventually graduating at the age of seventeen. Angelou and her brother moved back and forth between Stamps and St. When Angelou was three years old, her parents divorced and sent her and her brother to live with their grandmother in the harshly segregated Stamps, Arkansas. Angelou’s older brother, Bailey Jr., nicknamed her “Maya” when they were children. Louis, Missouri, to Bailey and Vivian Baxter Johnson. Poet, author, and professor Maya Angelou was born as Marguerite Johnson on Apin St.

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