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About Maya Angelou

By Joye Brown | Staff Writer

Writer, poet, educator, actress, autobiographer, playwright, producer, director, recording artist. And still the words are not enough to describe the varied life and talents of Maya Angelou. "All my life, all my work, everything is about survival," she has said.

And survive she has. Angelou flourished despite a wicked childhood, as any reader of the first in her series of acclaimed autobiographies, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," knows so well. She's recorded calypso songs and danced throughout Europe in a traveling production of "Porgy and Bess." She was the first black and the first female streetcar conductor in San Francisco. All that and she was not even out of her 20s.

Angelou, 70, also has written several powerful volumes of poetry that capture her mood -- and with it the mood of America -- from the struggles for civil rights to the need for renewal our nation faces today. "In all my work, what I try to say is that as human beings we are more alike than we are unalike," she told another interviewer.

Angelou knows the power of words and uses them majestically. Add to that the potency of her voice and it becomes an unbeatable combination. A nation sat spellbound to that combination in 1983, when Angelou read her poem, "On the Pulse of Morning," at the 1993 inauguration of President Bill Clinton. It's no accident that her message remains fresh to this day: