"The
honorary duty of a human being is to love, I am human,"
Angelou said, quoting from her own work, "and nothing human
can be alien to me."
Maya Angelou, born April 4, 1928 as
Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, was raised in segregated rural
Arkansas. She is a poet, historian, author, actress, playwright,
civil-rights activist, producer and director. She lectures
throughout the US and abroad and is Reynolds professor of American
Studies at Wake Forest University in North Carolina since 1981.
She has published ten best selling books and numerous magazine
articles earning her Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award
nominations. At the |
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request of President Clinton, she wrote and delivered a poem
at his 1993 presidential inauguration.
Dr.
Angelou, who speaks French, Spanish, Italian and West African
Fanti, began her career in drama and dance. She married a South
African freedom fighter and lived in Cairo where she was editor of
The Arab Observer, the only English-language news weekly in the
Middle East. In Ghana, she was feature editor of The African
Review and taught at the University of Ghana. In the 1960's, at
the request of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ms. Angelou became the
northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference.
Maya Angelou, poet, was among the
first African-American women to hit the bestsellers lists with her
"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," held the Great Hall
audience spellbound with stories of her own childhood. She ranged
from story to poem to song and back again, and her theme was love
and the universality of all lives. "The honorary duty of a
human being is to love," Angelou said. She spoke of her early
love for William Shakespeare's works, and offered her audience
excerpts from the poems of several African-Americans, including
James Weldon Johnson and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. But always, she
came back to love - and humanity. "I am human," Angelou
said, quoting from her own work, "and nothing human can be
alien to me."
In the sixties, at the request of Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., she became the northern coordinator for
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and in 1975 she
received the Ladies Home Journal Woman of the Year Award in
communications. She received numerous honorary degrees and was
appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the National Commission on
the Observance of International Women's Year and by President Ford
to the American Revolutionary Bicentennial Advisory Council. She
is on the board of the American Film Institute and is one of the
few female members of the Director's Guild.
In the film industry, through her work in
script writing and directing, Maya Angelou has been a
groundbreaker for black women. In television, she has made
hundreds of appearances. Her best-selling autobiographical account
of her youth, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," won critical acclaim in
1970 and was a two hour TV special on CBS. She has written and
produced several prize winning documentaries, including
"Afro-Americans in the Arts," a PBS special for which
she received the Golden Eagle Award. She was also nominated for an
Emmy Award for her acting in Roots, and her screenplay “Georgia,
Georgia” was the first by a black woman to be filmed. In
theatre, she produced, directed and starred in "Cabaret for
Freedom" in collaboration with Godfrey Cambridge at New
York's Village Gate; starred in Genet's "The Blacks" at
St Mark's Playhouse; and adapted
Sophocles "Ajax" which premiered in Los Angeles in 1974.
She wrote the original screenplay for "Georgia, Georgia"
and wrote and produced a ten-part TV series on African traditions
in American life. Maya Angelou is currently a Reynolds Professor
at Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
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