it is logical that the first week of us. National Poetry Month in April coincides with what would have been the 90th birthday of poet Maya Angelou, who died on May 28, 2014 at the age of 86. and google is celebrating angelou’s birthday with a doodle.
but while maya angelou is best known today for her writing, as the author of more than 30 books and the recipient of more than 50 honorary degrees, she had many different careers before she became a writer, all before she was 40 years old, as Time noted in her 2014 obituary. Angelou’s jobs include: cook, waitress, sex worker, dancer, actress, playwright, editor of an English-language newspaper in Egypt, calypso singer, and opera cast member porgy and bess.in fact, angelou’s name is more of a stage name than a pseudonym; angelou was born marguerite annie johnson in st. louis in 1928, but in the 1950s she came up with “maya angelou”, which is kind of a portmanteau, by combining her childhood nickname and a riff on the last name of her then-husband her.
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In a google doodle marking her birthday on april 4th, angelou can be heard reading “i still rise,” along with testimonials from her son guy johnson, oprah winfrey, laverne cox, alicia keys, america ferrera and Martin McBride. Keys, a 15-time Grammy winner, calls Angelou a “renaissance woman,” while McBride, a 14-time Grammy nominee, says Angelou inspired her to write her own songs. Winfrey, who has called Angelou a mentor, says that “Maya Angelou is not what she has done, written or spoken, it is how she did it all. she moved through the world with unshakable calm, confidence, and fiery, fiery grace and abundant love.”
Here are five things you should know about the Mayan literary legend Angelou:
1.I know why the caged bird singsit was the first book by maya angelou
as the world celebrates her birthday in 2018, maya angelou’s breakout work is particularly relevant to the national conversation. long before the #metoo and #timesup movements brought sexual assault into the national conversation, she wrote in her 1969 memoir about her own experience with sexual trauma and how her mother’s boyfriend raped her when she was a child. She was convicted and imprisoned, and after her release she was beaten to death, a series of events that led her to stop speaking for a while.
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“I thought I caused her death because I told her name to the family…” she wrote in a 2013 op-ed in the guardian. “I decided that my voice was so powerful that it could kill people.”
In an interview with Winfrey, Angelou said that while some places banned the book because of the rape scene, she also believed the book had saved lives by providing a model of resistance. “I just read somewhere that after a woman read Caged Bird, she realized she was not alone,” she told the media mogul. as he once said in another interview, “the encounter can be the very experience that creates the vitality and power to resist.”
2. maya angelou was san francisco’s first african-american cable car driver
“I loved the uniforms,” he once told oprah winfrey, explaining why he wanted this particular job when he was 16. Following the advice of her mother, she went to the city office that hired cable car drivers and she sat there reading Russian literature until they agreed to hire her. her mother got up with her at 4:00 a.m. m. for her shifts at dawn and she followed her in her car “with her gun in the passenger seat” to keep an eye on her.
3. maya angelou was also one of the first african american women in the directors guild of america
first joined in 1975, shortly after writing the 1972 interracial romance film georgia, georgia, but made her official directorial debut in the 1970s with down in the delta (1998). The film is about a mother who sends her children away from Chicago to live with her family in rural Mississippi so they can learn about her roots.
4. angelou’s “on the pulse of morning” was only the second poem written for a presidential inauguration
Bill Clinton selected her to be the second poet to read an original work at a presidential inauguration, following in the footsteps of Robert Frost, who recited “The Absolute Gift” in John F. Kennedy’s inauguration.
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Growing up in Stamps, Arkansas, about 30 minutes south of Hopeful’s birthplace, Clinton, his job reminded him of the Democratic president of the grocery store his grandfather ran in a predominantly African-American neighborhood. “When I read, I knew why the caged bird sings, I knew exactly who she was talking about and what she was talking about in that book,” she said.
5. angelou won three grammy awards and more
has three grammy awards (and five nominations) for best spoken word albums: in 1993, 1995 and 2002, for on the pulse of morning, phenomenal woman and a song thrown into heaven, respectively. But his rewards don’t stop there. For example, she was nominated for a 1973 Tony Award for Best Supporting or Featured Actress (Dramatic) for her role in Jerome Kilty’s 1972 play Look Away.
Given her complicated life, it is perhaps not surprising that Angelou has written seven autobiographies, the last published almost a year before her death. as angelou said then, writing, although a career came late in life, was what she did.
“I’ll probably be writing,” he said, “when the lord says, ‘maya, maya angelou, it’s time.'”
write to olivia b. waxman at olivia.waxman@time.com.
write to olivia b. waxman at olivia.waxman@time.com.