Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou was an American poet, memoirist, and civil-rights activist whose seven autobiographies — beginning with the foundational 1969 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings — made her one of the most-influential African-American writers of the 20th century. She was born Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, and raised primarily by her grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. After being sexually assaulted at age seven, she stopped speaking for almost five years — a period of selective mutism during which, by her own account, she developed her acute writer's ear by listening rather than speaking.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) — the first volume of what would become her seven-book autobiographical series — covers her early life through age 17 and broke significant ground as the first widely-read autobiography by an African-American woman. The book has remained continuously in print and is taught in American high schools and universities. The subsequent volumes (Gather Together in My Name 1974, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas 1976, The Heart of a Woman 1981, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes 1986, A Song Flung Up to Heaven 2002, and Mom & Me & Mom 2013) cover her adult life as a dancer, actress, civil-rights worker, and writer.

Angelou worked closely with civil-rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in the early 1960s — she served as Northern Coordinator of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She was the first Black woman to write and recite an inaugural poem at a US presidential inauguration: "On the Pulse of Morning" at Bill Clinton's January 1993 inauguration. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2011.

She died on May 28, 2014, at age 86, at her home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she had lived for over 30 years and held the Reynolds Chair in American Studies at Wake Forest University.

Her name Maya has multiple proposed origins: Sanskrit ("illusion"), Hebrew (a short form of Miryam/Mary), Greek (mother of Hermes in classical mythology), and Latin ("great" or "magnitude"). Maya has been continuously among the most-popular American girls' names since the early 2000s.