Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou has been a major influence on my life and has been a wonderful role model as I have become a young adult. Maya Angelou is confident, determined, dedicated and has never let life keep her down. I had the pleasure of seeing her in person at Randolph College in the beginning of this semester and it was literally one of the greatest moments of my life. Yes I stood outside in line for almost 3 hours and yes I sat way in the back of the auditorium and did not get to see her up close, but just to hear her speak gave me the drive to do what I want to do in my life and not to let anything deter me from my dreams.

On mayaqangelou.com I learned that Maya Angelou was born on April 4th, 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri. Throughout her adolescent years she was raised between St. Louis, Missouri and Stamps, Arkansas. Although she faced racial discrimination in Stamps, she became very rooted in the religion, morals and values of her family and culture. As a teenager Maya Angelou won a scholarship for San Francisco's Labor School to learn dance and drama. Although she dropped out at the age of 14 and became the first African-American female cable car conductor in San Francisco, she went back and finished high school and gave birth to her son Guy a couple weeks after her graduation. As a single mother, Maya Angelou has done many things in her lifetime with dance, music, and her love for performing. According to mayaangelou.com she has done many things over the years. In 1954-1955 she toured Europe with the opera Porgy and Bess, in 1957 she recorded her first album Calypso Lady, in 1958 she moved to New York and joined the Harlem Writers Guild as well as performed in two Off-Broadway productions.

Maya Angelou has even had the courage to live abroad in different countries of several years. In 1960 she moved to Egypt and serves as a writer for The Arab Observer, an English weekly newspaper in Egypt. In 1961 she moved to Ghana and taught at the University of Ghana's School of Music and Drama, wrote for the Ghanaian Times, and served as an editor for The African Review. Aside from the teaching and writing, while Maya Angelou was abroad she also learned French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and the West African language Fanti.

In 1964, Maya Angelou returned to the states with the intentions of helping Malcolm X build his Organization of African American Unity. Unfortunately shortly after she returned to the states, Malcolm X was assassinated and the organization dissolved. Although this was a tremendous negative in her life, she was soon asked to serve as Northern Coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. King's assassination in 1968 was another hard time for Maya Angelou, to help cope she began work on her book I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings which was published in 1970. She now has over 30 bestselling works including poems, fiction, and non-fiction books.

Maya Angelou has been more than an academic influence and an activist, she has also been in the media and political world as well. On mayaangelou.com I learned that in 1972 Maya Angelou wrote the film Georgia, Georgia, wrote poetry for and narrated the documentary The Black Candle and has been in several different movies, such as Roots, Poetic Justice and several others. She has also served on two presidential committees, was requested to read at President Clinton's inauguration in 1993, she was also awarded the Presidential Medal of Arts in 2000, the Lincoln Medal in 2008, and has received 3 Grammy Awards.