Stamps was the childhood home of author Maya Angelou, and was depicted in her book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

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.

Angelou is best known for her series of autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences.

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.

With the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou was one of the first African American women who was able to publicly discuss her personal life.

Angelou is best known for her autobiographies, but she is also an established poet, although her poems have received mixed reviews.

When Angelou was three, and her brother four, their parents ' " calamitous marriage " ended.

At the age of eight, while living with her mother, Angelou was sexually abused and raped by her mother's boyfriend, Mr. Freeman.

And then I thought I would never speak again, because my voice would kill anyone ..." According to Marcia Ann Gillespie and her colleagues, who wrote a biography about Angelou, it was during this period of silence when Angelou developed her extraordinary memory, her love for books and literature, and her ability to listen and observe the world around her.

Shortly after Freeman's murder, Angelou and her brother were sent back to their grandmother once again.

Angelou credits a teacher and friend of her family, Mrs. Bertha Flowers, with helping her speak again.

Angelou returned to the U. S. in 1965 to help him build a new civil rights organization, the Organization of Afro-American Unity ; he was assassinated shortly afterward.

When Caged Bird was published in 1969, Angelou was hailed as a new kind of memoirist, one of the first African-American women who was able to publicly discuss her personal life.

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.

As a young servant, Anna ( María Celedonio / Maya Angelou ) starts an affair with her boss's son, Beck ( Jared Leto ), who's visiting from Chicago.

When Angelou was 14, she and her brother moved in with their mother once again ; she had since moved to Oakland, California.

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

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.

And, also in New York, she played Mary Todd Lincoln opposite Maya Angelou in a two-character play by Jerome Kilty called Look Away.

Many prominent leaders were present, including Coretta Scott King and Myrlie Evers-Williams, poet Maya Angelou, actor-activists Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, New York Governor George Pataki, and four New York City mayors — Abraham Beame, Ed Koch, David Dinkins, and Rudy Giuliani.

With its publication, Angelou became known, according to the New York Times Book Review, as an author who " writes like a song, and like the truth.

* Bernard McGuirk, his producer, is the show's antagonist, whom Imus has sometimes referred to as a " bald-headed stooge "; he also performs character voices ( such as New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, former New York Catholic Archbishops Cardinals Edward Egan and John Joseph O ' Connor, and poet Maya Angelou ).

Bush ; Congressman John F. Tierney ; television host and comedian, Jay Leno ; head coach of the New England Patriots, Bill Belichick ; baseball legend, Cal Ripken Jr .; award-winning actor and director, Robert Redford ; and poet, Maya Angelou.

Maya Angelou Academy was founded in 2007, first at Oak Hill Youth Center, and now currently the educational program serving DYRS committed youth at New Beginnings Youth Development Center.

Maya Angelou Academy provides a safe, structured, and intensive learning environment to the youth it serves at New Beginnings Youth Development Center.

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 ".

As Angelou later stated, " I thought if I spoke, my mouth would just issue out something that would kill people, randomly, so it was better not to talk ".

She accuses Angelou of combining a dozen metaphors in one paragraph and for " obscuring ideas that could be expressed so much more simply and felicitously ".

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

Angelou became mute for almost five years, believing, as she has stated, " I thought, my voice killed him ; I killed that man, because I told his name.

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.

Since the 1990s, Angelou has actively participated in the lecture circuit in a customized tour bus, something she continued into her eighties.

Over thirty years after Angelou began writing her life story, she completed the sixth and final autobiography in her series of six, A Song Flung Up to Heaven, in 2002.

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.

Because Angelou uses thematic development and other techniques common to fiction, reviewers often categorize Caged Bird as autobiographical fiction, but the prevailing critical view characterizes it as an autobiography, a genre she attempts to critique, change, and expand.

The assassinations were " particularly painful " for Angelou because she had agreed to work for both Malcolm X and King a few months before their deaths.

At first, Angelou refused, since she thought of herself as a poet and playwright.

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

Although she did not intend to compose a series of autobiographies, Angelou later wrote five additional volumes, covering a variety of her young adult experiences.

Angelou goes through this process to " enchant " herself, and as she said in a 1989 interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation, to " relive the agony, the anguish, the Sturm und Drang ".

Angelou has stated that she plays cards to reach that place of enchantment, to access her memories more effectively.

When selecting a title, Angelou turned to Paul Laurence Dunbar, an African-American poet whose works she had admired for years.

When speaking of her use of autobiography, Angelou acknowledges that she has followed the slave narrative tradition of " speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I meaning ' we '".

Angelou recognizes that there are fictional aspects to her books – she tends to " diverge from the conventional notion of autobiography as truth ".

Author Lyman B. Hagen places Angelou in the long tradition of African American autobiography, but insists that she has created a unique interpretation of the autobiographical form.

" Although Angelou has never admitted to changing the facts in her stories, she has used these facts to make an impact with the reader.

For example, while Angelou was composing her second autobiography, Gather Together in My Name, she was concerned about how her readers would react to her disclosure that she had been a prostitute.