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Maya Angelou is born
Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri. 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. 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. -
Maya Angelou gives birth to guy Johnson
when Angelou was 13 she and her brother returned to live with her mother in San Francisco.She later returned to high school, but became pregnant in her senior year and graduated a few weeks before giving birth to her son, Guy. 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. -
Maya Angelou becomes first black female streetcar conductor
My mother said, "Yes, but do you want the job?" And I said yes, and she said, "Go get it." "Here, I'll give you money.Every day, you go down and be there before the secretaries get there. You sit there in the office. You read one of your big, thick Russian books. (I was reading Dostoevsky or Tolstoy or something at the time.) And when they go to lunch, you go. Go to a good restaurant. -
Maya Angelou marries Tosh Angelou
In 1952, she married a Greek sailor named Tosh Angelou.
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. Although the marriage did not last, her performing career flourished. -
Maya Angelou tours with the opera Porgy and Bess
Blevins Davis and Robert Breen produced a revival in 1952 which restored much of the music cut in the Crawford version, including many of the recitatives, and divided the opera into two acts, with the intermission occurring after Crown forces Bess to stay on kittiwah Island. This version restored the work to a more operatic form, though not all of the recitatives were retained, and Porgy and Bess was warmly received through Europe. -
Maya Angelou records her first album Miss Calypso
This reissue was probably motivated by the exotica-space age pop revival.The cover, after all, features Angelou draped in a slip of a red dress, gyrating next to a fire in the middle of a (almost definitely fake) jungle. It's really not that strange or cheesy, though. It's more or less straight-ahead pop-calypso, sung with respectable gutsiness by Angelou, who wrote almost half of the material. -
Maya Angelou Publishes I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings
Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the 1969 autobiography about the early years of African-American writer and poet Maya Angelou.
The first in a six-volume series, it is a coming-of-age story that illustrates how strength of character and a love of literature can help overcome racism and trauma. The book begins when three-year-old Maya and her older brother are sent to Stamps, Arkansas, to live with their grandmother and ends when Maya becomes a mother at the age of 17 -
Georgia, Georgia first script by an African American woman to be filmed
A trailblazer in film and television, Dr. Angelou wrote the screenplay and composed the score for the 1972 film Georgia, Georgia. Her script, the first by an African American woman ever to be filmed, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.Georgia, a black American singer, comes to Stockholm for a show. She meets an American deserter and soon they have fallen in love. But Georgia's assistant Alberta tell her to stick to her own kind. -
Maya Angelou receives Pulitzer Prize Nomination
Poems of love and regret, of racial strife and confrontation, songs of people and songs of the heart - all are charged with Maya Angelou's zest for life and her rage at injustice.Lyrical poems of longing, wry glances at betrayal and isolation combine with a fierce insight into "hateful wrath". -
Maya Angelou marries Paul du Feu
In 1973, Angelou married Paul du Feu, a British-born carpenter and remodeler, and moved to Sonoma, California with him.
The years to follow were some of Angelou's most productive years as a writer and poet. She worked as a composer, including writing for singer Roberta Flack, and composed movie scores. She wrote articles, short stories, TV scripts, autobiographies and poetry, produced plays, and spoke on the the university lecture circuit. -
Maya Angelou recites On the Pulse of Morning at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton
In 1993, she recited her poem On the Pulse of Morning at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton, becoming the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961.Since the 1990s, Angelou has actively participated in the lecture circuit. -
Maya Angelou Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
Maya Angelou was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on February 15, 2011 by President Barak Obama.Dr. Angelou also received the Presidential Medal for the Arts in 2000 and the Lincoln Medal in 2008. And in 2012, First Lady Michelle Obama had the opportunity to present her with the Literary Arts Award at the BET Honors ceremony in Washington, D.C. -
Maya Angelou Dies
Maya Angelou died on the morning of May 28, 2014, according to a family statement. She was found by her nurse. Although Angelou had reportedly been in poor health and had canceled recent scheduled appearances, she was working on another book, an autobiography about her experiences with national and world leaders.
