Maya Angelou

1928 - 2014

Maya Angelou was an American poet, author, and civil rights activist. Angelou saw herself as a link in a much longer chain of history. Her role was to weave the personal and the political together so tightly that you couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. By focusing on themes of community, family, and the struggle for civil rights, she positioned the poet as the conscience of the nation. She refused to let poetry stay trapped in the clouds of abstract philosophy, choosing instead to plant it firmly in the soil of American social reality. Whether she was writing about her childhood in the South or the global struggle for equality, her work remains a masterclass in how to use the "I" of the poet to speak for the "we" of the people.