Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, and spent much of her childhood with her grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. At eight she was raped by her mother's boyfriend. After the man was killed, she stopped speaking for almost five years.

As a young woman she worked as a cook, a streetcar conductor, a nightclub dancer and a singer. She toured Europe in a production of Porgy and Bess, lived in Egypt and Ghana, and worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in the civil rights movement.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) tells her life up to age 16. It shows how racism and trauma shaped a Black girl in the segregated South and how books gave her back her voice. It was the first of seven autobiographies. Some schools have banned it over its scenes of rape and sexuality.

She also published poetry, read her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at Bill Clinton's 1993 inauguration and taught at Wake Forest University for three decades. She died in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 2014, aged 86.