Female writer: Maya Angelou (1928-2014)

 

WHO WAS SHE?

Maya Angelou was an american writer, singer and activist for the civil rights. She has a very hard life (I won’t talk about that, so you will have to read her books/autobiographies). She took dance classes and danced contemporary dance in African American organizations of San Francisco. Then she danced and sang in nightclubs and try to learn the language of each country that she visited, so she spoke a lot of languages. Along with Martin Luther King Jr, they organized the ‘Cabaret for freedom’ to benefit the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and later on she started her activism pro-Castro and anti-apartheid. She acted in several plays and then she started writing, among other things, her famous autobiographies. The one that make her famous was I know why the caged bird sings, a book that tells her memories until her seventeens.

WHAT HAS SHE WRITTEN?

·         I know why the caged bird sings (1969)

·         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)

·         Mom & me & mom (2013)

I attach here her bibliography because she wrote so many books that it is impossible to write them all here, that’s why I just put her autobiographies.

WHAT HAS SHE SAID?

‘If you’re always trying to be normal you will never know how amazing you can be’.

WHY WE SHOULD NOT FORGET HER AND HER WORK?

She is a clear example of overcoming. She overcame sexual abuses by a member of her family, she had a hard life and she had to work as a prostitute, etc, to turn into a great political activist, in favor of the rights of her race and in favor of women. She also stirred up the autobiographical genre because of the themes she talks about in her books, worthy of reading.

-Saru