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She was also an educator and served as the Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University as well as on two presidential committees, for Gerald Ford in 1975 and for Jimmy Carter in 1977. As a civil rights activist, Angelou worked for Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X. She had a broad career as a singer, dancer, actress, composer, and Hollywood’s first female Black director, but became most famous as a writer, editor, essayist, playwright and poet.

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) was born Marguerite Johnson in St Louis, Missouri. Angelou was a writer, poet, professional dancer, activist, and the first Black streetcar conductor in San Francisco but, above all, she was the voice of humanity. Racial prejudice permeated every aspect of their lives but somehow hope and optimism prevailed, and this book is an essential social history as much as a brilliantly crafted memoir. They moved back and forth, experiencing both city life and the rural Deep South, and spending a long period with their birth mother in San Francisco. It begins with her parents’ separation, when three-year-old Angelou and her four-year-old brother Bailey were sent from their St Louis home to live with their grandmother in a sleepy town in Arkansas.

Her writing is both powerful and poetic and it is easy to forget that this is a memoir: the first of seven that she would eventually write about her incredible life. ‘A brilliant writer, and a truly phenomenal woman’Ī voracious reader and prodigious writer from a very young age, Angelou had an extraordinary talent for transporting readers to the heart of her story and into the lives of its characters. Winner of Best Book Cover award (Professional) at World Illustration Awards 2021. Artist Shabazz Larkin has created a beautiful binding design and a series of electrifying illustrations that capture key moments in the author’s girlhood, while award-winning novelist Tayari Jones conveys why this book has touched the hearts and minds of millions of readers in her emotive new introduction. This new edition celebrates the literary magnitude of the book, as well as its enduring appeal. Her growth into womanhood finally becomes one of celebration and achievement. She experiences the joys and sorrows of Black American life, but with grit and determination, and the warmth of the community that raised her, Angelou forges a different life for herself. Written in 1969, it recounts Angelou’s early experiences as a woman of colour in the segregated Deep South where, surrounded by bigotry and poverty, daily life was lived on a knife-edge. ‘She taught us all that it is okay to be your regular old self, whatever that is – your poor self, your broken self, your brilliant, bold phenomenal self.’Ī great American classic, Maya Angelou’s powerful and perceptive memoir forged a path for Black American women’s writing and made her an international icon.