Maya angelou
445 mots
2 pages
Maya AngelouBorn 4 april 1928 St Louis Missouri. Maya Angelou is a renowned writer mainly poet, but also novelist and memoirist.
Her writing reveals that she is a civil-rights activist.
She grew up in St Louis and in Stamps in Arkansas. She was raised in the faith and values of the African-American culture. In Stamps, she was the target of brutality and racial discrimination.
At 14, because of her love for/ of art, she won a scholarship to study dance and drama in San Francisco. There she found a job and became the first African-American cable car driver in San Francisco. Just after her graduation she gave birth to her son and raised him as a single mother by working as a waitress. But her passion will soon come back in her life.
From 1954 to 1960, she her passion by dancing in opera or cabaret and recording an album called calypso Lady.
In 1960, she moved to Cairo in Egypt and worked as an editor for the Arab Observer.
A year after, she moved to Ghana and taught at the University of Ghana’s school of Music and Drama, worked as a feature editor for the African Review, and wrote for the Ghanaian Times.
During all her travelling, Maya Angelou learnt speaking French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and some of the West African languages.
In Ghana, she met Malcolm X and decided to return in America to help him build the Organization of African American Unity. But he died shortly after her arrival in the United States and the organization dissolved.
Then, she helped Martin Luther King as a coordinator. The assassination of King happened on her birthday, it left her devastated.
In 1969, she wrote her first autobiography entitled I Know why the caged bird sings with the help of James Baldwin, a novelist. This book was enormously popular and became a bestseller. She now has written more than 30 bestsellers.
She also wrote the script for the movie Georgia, Georgia which was released in 1972. This movie is mainly about an interracial relationship