Born April 24, 1928, St. Louis Missouri, Maya Angelou was an American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist. An instrumental figure in the civil rights movement, Angelou published autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. She has a sum of 30 best selling books published in her career. With her long list of accomplishments and influential literature, she received more than 50 honorary degrees and dozens of awards to recognize her literary genius.
Maya Angelou has come a long way in her career, starting with her rise to fame from the publication of “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” in 1969, after joining the Harlem Writers Guild. She has since then been recognized on the federal level as the US mint recently began featuring Maya Angelou on quarters, the first coin in the American Women Quarters Program. This champion of Civil Rights literature received the Presidential Medal of Freedom by president Barack Obama in 2010. Maya Angelou and her books have been taught around the globe in different levels of school.
Maya Angelou contributed to the Civil rights movement by also working with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, some of the most prominent and well-known people of the movement. She also worked as an educator and served as the Reynolds professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University. She served in two Presidential committees, for Gerald Ford in 1975 and for Jimmy Carter in 1977 and Angelou was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Bill Clinton, in 2000. Her love for expression came from a childhood trauma that resulted in her being mute for years, since then she has transformed her life and impacted people more than imaginable through her writing.