12/5/2023 0 Comments Caged bird maya angelouAngelou and Guy later moved to Ghana, where she joined a thriving group of African American expatriates. In Cairo, Angelou served as editor of the English language weekly The Arab Observer. In New York, she fell in love with the South African civil rights activist Vusumzi Make and in 1960, the couple moved, with Angelou's son, to Cairo, Egypt. She acted in the historic Off-Broadway production of Jean Genet's The Blacks and wrote and performed a Cabaret for Freedom with the actor and comedian Godfrey Cambridge. She moved to New York, where she joined the Harlem Writers Guild and took her place among the growing number of young black writers and artists associated with the Civil Rights Movement. She had composed song lyrics and poems for many years, and by the end of the 1950s was increasingly interested in developing her skills as a writer. She studied modern dance with Martha Graham, danced with Alvin Ailey on television variety shows and recorded her first record album, Calypso Lady (1957). She toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess in 19. Although the marriage did not last, her performing career flourished. When she began her career as a nightclub singer, she took the professional name Maya Angelou, combining her childhood nickname with a form of her husband's name. In 1952, she married a Greek sailor named Anastasios Angelopulos. She left home at 16 and took on the difficult life of a single mother, supporting herself and her son by working as a waitress and cook, but she had not given up on her talents for music, dance, performance and poetry. When she later heard the news that an uncle had killed her attacker, she felt that her words had killed the man. Too ashamed to tell any of the adults in her life, she confided in her brother. Unable to pronounce her name because of a stutter, Bailey called her "My" for "My Sister." A few years later, when he read a book about the Maya Indians, he began to call her "Maya," and the name stuck.Īt age seven, while visiting her mother in Chicago, she was sexually molested by her mother's boyfriend. She enjoyed a close relationship with her brother. She credits her grandmother and her extended family with instilling in her the values that informed her later life and career. In Stamps, the young girl experienced the racial discrimination that was the legally enforced way of life in the American South, but she also absorbed the deep religious faith and old fashioned courtesy of traditional African American life. Her parents divorced when she was only three and she was sent with her brother Bailey to live with their grandmother in the small town of Stamps, Arkansas. Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4th, 1928, in St. Angelou is a celebrated poet, memoirist, novelist, educator, dramatist, producer, actress, historian, filmmaker, and civil rights activist. Hailed as a global renaissance woman, Dr. Maya Angelou was one of the most renowned and influential voices of our time. MAYA ANGELOU Biography of America's Renaissance Womanĭr.
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