Maya Angelou, 
Alpha female?

Dr. Maya Angelou is a remarkable Renaissance woman who is hailed as one of the great voices of contemporary literature.  As a poet, educator, historian, best-selling author, actress, playwright, civil-rights  activist, producer and director, she continues to travel the world, spreading her legendary wisdom.  Within the rhythm of her poetry and elegance of her prose lies Angelou's unique power to help readers of every orientation span the lines of race. Angelou captivates audiences through the vigor and sheer beauty of her words and lyrics.

Maya Angelou lectures throughout the US and abroad and is Reynolds professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. She has published twelve best selling books and countless magazine articles. At the request of President Clinton, she wrote and delivered a poem at the 1993 presidential inauguration.

Dr. Angelou began her career in drama and dance. She married a South African freedom fighter and lived in Cairo where she was editor of The Arab Observer, the only English-language news weekly in the Middle East. In Ghana, she was feature editor of The African Review and taught at the University of Ghana. In the 1960s, at the request of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ms. Angelou became the northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She was appointed by President Gerald Ford to the Bicentennial Commission and by President Jimmy Carter to the National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year.

In the film industry, through her work in script writing and directing, Maya Angelou has been a groundbreaker for black women. Multi-talented, she produced and starred in the great play Cabaret for Freedom and starred in The Blacks. She wrote the original screenplay and musical score for the film Georgia, Georgia and was both author and executive producer of a five-part television miniseries, Three Way Choice. In television, she has made hundreds of appearances. Her renowned autobiographical account of her youth, "I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings," was a two hour TV special on CBS. She has written and produced several prize winning documentaries, including "Afro-Americans in the Arts," a PBS special for which she received the Golden Eagle Award. Dr. Angelou speaks French, Spanish, Italian and West African Fanti.

Miss Angelou's accomplishments have earned her the La Home Journal Woman of the Year award in communication an Matrix Award in the field of books from Women in Communication She received the Golden Eagle Award for her documentary, Americans in the Arts, produced by PBS. She is one of the women admitted into the Director's Guild. In 1974, she was appointed by Gerald Ford to the Bi-Centennial Commission and later by Jimmie Carter to the Commission for International Woman of the Year.

Her personal outreach to improve conditions for women in Third World, primarily in Africa, has helped change the live thousands less privileged. Here is where she gives with all her heart and soul.

And all of these accomplishments grew out of the most transient and tumultuous childhood.  Born on April 4, 1928 in Saint Louis, Missouri, Marguerite Johnson adopted the name Maya Angelou in her twenties when she performed as a dancer at the Purple Onion cabaret.  Her father, Bailey Johnson, was a navy dietician, and her mother was Vivian Johnson.  She has one brother, Bailey, and when her parents divorced when she was three years old, they went to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas.  She loved her grandmother whom she called "momma", who had a deep-brooding love that hung over everything she touched. Growing up in Stamps, in the Deep South, Maya learned what it was like to grow up in a white-controlled-world.  She wore hand me down clothes from white women, and was refused to be seen by a white dentist. Her grandmother instilled a strong value for religion while they lived with her. 

After five years with their grandmother, Maya's mother asked that they return to St. Louis to live with her.  There, her mother's boyfriend raped Maya, and as a result she did not talk at all for five years.  Her mother did not know what to do, so sent her back to her grandmother.  With the nurturing help of Mrs. Flowers, Maya eventually grew more confident and self-assured. 

Again she and her brother went to live with her mother who was now living in San Francisco.  Her mother's home seemed to be in constant upheaval so she eventually went to live with her father and  his girlfriend in a ramshackle trailer.  Maya found life to be no more stable there so she finally found a place to stay in a car graveyard where other homeless children lived.  She had trouble maturing into an adult due to the lack of stable role models and the constantly changing environments.  At sixteen she found herself pregnant with a son, Guy. 

As part of this transient lifestyle, Maya experienced various jobs from working as a Creole cook, a streetcar conductor, a cocktail waitress, a dancer, and a madam to later emerging as a singer, actress, playwright, an editor, a lecturer and civil rights activist and a successful writer.  Her volumes include five volumes of poetry and twelve books.  At Bill Clinton's inauguration she read one of her poems "On the Pulse of Morning" as the second poet to read her own works at a Presidential Inauguration.