Maya Angelou
Varied career including: nightclub performer, composer, and Hollywood’s first female black director. Not to mention seven autobiographies, three books of essays and various poetry books and being Hollywood's first black, female director.
Also an avid civil rights activist, Angelou worked with Dr. King jr and Malcolm X. She served on two presidential commitees, with Ford in 75 and Carter in 77.
Before her death in 2014, she was awarded over 50 honorary awards, including National Medal of Arts by Clinton in 2000 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (the highest US civilian honour) by Obama in 2010.
Angelou became a member of the Harlem Writer's Guild in last 1950's where she met James Baldwin, a black writer "whose eloquence and passion on the subject of race in America made him an important voice." (https://www.britannica.com/biography/James-Baldwin)
It was during this time she became inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King's message and became a part of civil rights movement and became northern co-ordinator for Dr King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
Following this, she moved to Ghana in West Africa in 1962 and upon er return to the states became work on 'I know why the Caged Bird Sings', her first book that told her story from childhood to the birth of her first son. The book was an immediate success and is taught in schools to this day despite controversy over her honest 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 emphasise themes."
A widely-read and highly revered poet, her 1971 Just Give Me A Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie was nominated for a Pulitzer prize the following year.
Carol Neubauer wrote 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 well as autobiographies and poems, Angelous had a successful career in film and TV too. In 1972 she became the first black woman to have a screenplay produced with Georgia, Georgia and was nominated for an Emmy for her time in Roots in 1977. In 79 she helped adapt her first book into a television movie of the same name.
Asked by Bill Clinton to read and write an inaugural poem, in the early 1990s Americans across the country heard Angelou read On the Pulse, a call for peace between races and cultures and humankind.
Angelou also wrote several books for children in the early 90s. 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.
Her poetry was at it's best when performed and she performed to countless spellbound audiences, astounded as she bore her soul and commented on topics like race and sex on a social and psychological scale. She once said “Once I got into it [poetry] 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.”
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