Born: April 4, 1928, St. Louis, MO

Education: Mission High School, Stamps, Arkansas, graduated 1944

Died: May 28, 2014, Winston-Salem, NC

Distinguished writer Angelou recited her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at the 1993 presidential inauguration. “History, despite its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived but if faced With courage, need not be lived again,” she declared. “Lift up your eyes upon this day breaking for you. Give birth again To the dream.”

Courage, hope, and resilience were central in her career. In a childhood buffeted by divorce, rape, and Jim Crow, she instilled love and self-esteem from her grandmother. At school and church, Angelou learned to value poetry and music. She pursued drama but personal crises landed her in a chorus line. After a 1954–55 overseas tour with Porgy and Bess, she cosponsored a benefit concert for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and embraced the Civil Rights Movement. She also joined the Harlem Writers’ Guild, which inspired her acting, writing, and teaching, the latter as an endowed professor at Wake Forest University.

Angelou's more than twenty nonfiction and fiction books, famously I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), foreground black feminism and the self through narrative and poetic voices. She evokes the lived experience of being black and female in intersecting contexts of antiblack racism and male sexism, while revealing the indomitable human spirit.