Angelou, her new husband, and son moved to New York City so that she could study African dance with Trinidadian dancer Pearl Primus, but they returned to San Francisco a year later.

Up to that point she went by the name of " Marguerite Johnson ", or " Rita ", but at the strong suggestion of her managers and supporters at The Purple Onion she changed her professional name to " Maya Angelou ", a " distinctive name " that set her apart and captured the feel of her Calypso dance performances.

Recipients who have accepted this honor include Maya Angelou, Quincy Jones, Paul Simon, Deepak Chopra, Desmond and Leah Tutu, and Pastor James Wuye and Imam Mohammad Ashafa ( aka Nigeria's " The Imam and The Pastor " peacemaker team ).

For example, in Caged Bird, Angelou demonstrates the " racist habit " of renaming African Americans, as shown when her white employer insists on calling her " Mary ".

The Review has published early works by generations of important writers, including Robert Penn Warren, Ford Madox Ford, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Flannery O ' Connor, Boris Pasternak, Bertolt Brecht, Peter Taylor, Dylan Thomas, Anthony Hecht, Maya Angelou, Rita Dove, Derek Walcott, Thomas Pynchon, Woody Allen, Louise Erdrich, William Empson, Linda Gregg, Mark Van Doren, Kenneth Burke, Delmore Schwartz, and Ha Jin.

< blockquote class =" toccolours " style =" text-align: left ; width: 28 %; float: left ; margin: 10px 10px 5px 5px ; padding: 10px ; display: table ;"> Into the Music: " The album's last four songs, " Angelou ", " And the Healing Has Begun ", and " It's All in the Game / You Know What They're Writing About " are a veritable tour-de-force with Morrison summoning every vocal trick at his disposal from " Angelou's climactic shouts to the sexually-charged, half-mumbled monologue in " And the Healing Has Begun " to the barely audible whisper that is the album's final sound.

Maya Angelou called Baldwin her " friend and brother ", and credited him for " setting the stage " for her 1969 autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

", a ten-part series of documentaries which dealt with the connection between blues music and Black Americans ' African heritage, as well as what Angelou called the " Africanisms still current in the U. S ." for National Educational Television, the precursor of PBS.

In her words, Angelou was unable to " resist a challenge ", and she began writing Caged Bird.

Angelou reports that maintaining the distinction between herself and " the Maya character " is " damned difficult ", but " very necessary ".

Writer Hilton Als calls Angelou one of the " pioneers of self-exposure ", willing to focus honestly on the more negative aspects of her personality and choices.

Maya Angelou | Angelou ( shown here in 1993, reciting her poem, " On the Pulse of Morning ", at President Bill Clinton | Bill Clinton's inauguration ) demonstrates an evolution of female identity throughout her autobiographical works.

Scholar Mary Burgher believes that female Black autobiographers like Angelou have debunked the stereotypes of African American mothers as " breeder and matriarch ", and have presented them as having " a creative and personally fulfilling role ".

Angelou demonstrates, through her involvement with the black community of Stamps, as well as her presentation of vivid and realistic racist characters and " the vulgarity of white Southern attitudes toward African Americans ", her developing understanding of the rules for surviving in a racist society.

Arensberg insists that Angelou demonstrates how she, as a black child, evolves out of her " racial hatred ", common in the works of many contemporary black novelists and autobiographers.

Referring to the importance of literacy and methods of effective writing, Angelou once advised Oprah Winfrey in an 1993 interview to " do as West Africans do ... listen to the deep talk ", or the " utterances existing beneath the obvious ".

Hagen describes Angelou as a " natural storyteller ", with an ear for dialogue that reflect someone who is a good listener with a rich oral heritage.

** Braxton, Joanne M. " Symbolic Geography and Psychic Landscapes: A Conversation with Maya Angelou ", pp. 3 – 20

" Maya Angelou: An Interview ", pp. 149 – 158

She appeared in an off-Broadway review that inspired the film Calypso Heat Wave, in which Angelou sang and performed her own compositions.

In 1961, Angelou performed in Jean Genet's The Blacks, along with Abbey Lincoln, Roscoe Lee Brown, James Earl Jones, Louis Gossett, Godfrey Cambridge, and Cicely Tyson.

Norman premiered the song cycle woman. life. song by composer Judith Weir, a work commissioned for her by Carnegie Hall, with texts by Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Clarissa Pinkola Estés ; performed a selection of sacred music of Duke Ellington ; recorded a jazz album, Jessye Norman Sings Michel Legrand ; and was the soprano co-lead in Vangelis ' project Mythodea. Norman commended herself in Mussorgsky's songs, which she performed in Moscow in the original Russian.

The Village ( and surrounding New York City ) would later play central roles in the writings of, among others, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Marianne Moore, Maya Angelou, Rod McKuen, and Dylan Thomas, who collapsed at the Chelsea Hotel and died at St. Vincents Hospital at 170 West 12th Street, in the Village after drinking at the White Horse Tavern on November 5, 1953.

In March 2008 Maya Angelou stated that she planned to spend part of the year studying at the Unity Church.

Latifah was asked by Maya Angelou, who was unable to attend, to recite a poem written by Angelou at the memorial service for Michael Jackson in July 2009.

In 1993, Angelou recited her poem " On the Pulse of Morning " at President Bill Clinton's inauguration, the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961.

In 1951, Angelou married Greek electrician, former sailor, and aspiring musician Enistasious ( Tosh ) Angelos, despite the condemnation of interracial relationships at the time and the disapproval of her mother.

Angelou met novelist James O. Killens in 1959, and at his urging, moved to New York to concentrate on her writing career.

She and her son Guy moved to Cairo with Make where Angelou worked as an associate editor at the weekly English-language newspaper The Arab Observer.

Maya Angelou speaking at a rally for Barack Obama, 2008

In 1993, Angelou recited her poem " On the Pulse of Morning " at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton, becoming the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961.

Other featured speakers at past dinners have included Bill Clinton, Betty DeGeneres, Maya Angelou, Kweisi Mfume, Joseph Lieberman, Hillary Clinton, Richard Gephardt, John Lewis, Rosie O ' Donnell, Nancy Pelosi and Tim Gunn, and Suze Orman.

Another formation of black writers at that time was the Harlem Writers Guild, led by John O. Killens, which included Maya Angelou, Jean Carey Bond, Rosa Guy, and Sarah Wright among others.

Angelou introduces a unique point of view in American autobiography by revealing her life story through a narrator who is a Black female, at some points a child, and other points a mother.

As critic Pierre A. Walker notes, when Angelou wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings at the end of the 1960s, one of the necessary and accepted features of literature was thematic unity, and one of Angelou's goals was to create a book that satisfied this criterion.

In 2009, Maya Angelou narrated the award-winning documentary The Black Candle, the first film about Kwanzaa.

* The Black Candle: a Kwanzaa film narrated by Maya Angelou

Baldwin also knew Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, Billy Dee Williams, Huey P. Newton, Nikki Giovanni, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet ( with whom he campaigned on behalf of the Black Panther Party ), Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, Rip Torn, Alex Haley, Miles Davis, Amiri Baraka, Martin Luther King, Jr., Margaret Mead, Josephine Baker, Allen Ginsberg and Maya Angelou.

In late 2010, Angelou donated her personal papers and career memorabilia to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.

Up until this time, Black women were not depicted realistically in African American fiction and autobiography, so Angelou was one of the first Black autobiographers to present, as Cudjoe put it, " a powerful, authentic and authentic signification of American womanhood in her quest for understanding and love rather than for bitterness and despair ".

The Martinique-born French Frantz Fanon and African-American writers Langston Hughes (" That Word Black "), Maya Angelou, and Ralph Ellison, among others, wrote that negative symbolisms surrounding the word " black " outnumber positive ones.