Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou was an African-American woman who was a widely known poet and civil rights activist. She had a rough childhood; her mother’s boyfriend raped her when she was seven and she consequently did not speak again for six years. When she was 17, Angelou took her son and moved out of her mother’s house. She first performed as a singer and dancer in nightclubs before finding her true passion in writing. Throughout her life, Angelou published 36 books, from autobiographies to volumes of poetry. She was a member of the Harlem Writers Guild, which is the oldest organization of African-American writers. In 1969, she published an autobiography, “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings”, which discussed the issues she’d had in her childhood surrounding racial identity and sexism.