Maya Angelou

Unsure where to start your online research? You'll find a biography, a photo, two bibliographies, and some links at Angelou's page at the Voices From the Gaps site.

One interesting way to see the scope of Angelou's work is to browse through the list of her citations at the Library of Congress. Does anything you find there surprise you?

If you're interested in the personal touch, you can click here to see what Angelou's signature looks like in a first edition of All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes.

Here is an etext of Angelou's "On the Pulse of Morning," a poem she read at Bill Clinton's first inauguration. She was the second poet to be so honored by a President of the United States. (The first was Robert Frost, who read at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy.)

Click here to listen to an interview Oprah Winfrey conducted with Angelou in December 2000.

In this interview from Mother Jones magazine, Angelou participates in a lively discussion about art and politics in the U.S.

To put Angelou's work into a historical context, you will need to know something about the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. Here's a good general introduction to segregation and Jim Crow from The Columbia Encyclopedia, as well as some related links.

Here is some information about a film that Angelou directed in 1998 called Down in the Delta. How do you think her work here relates to her writing?

To expand your knowledge about this author's personal history, consult this chronology of recent events in her life from her official website.

Interested in Angelou's collaboration with other artists? This site provides some information about her collaboration with the painter Jean-Paul Basquiat.