In elementary school, I remembered one teacher who took pride in an author and forced us to read a poem she wrote. Despite all our complaining and groaning, we still did it. Predictably, when we read the poem Caged Bird, we couldn’t put it down. We kept reading it and rereading it until the teacher literally ordered us to turn the page. I loved it, and when I read more of the writer’s works, I continued to love it. That writer was Maya Angelou.

Maya Angelou was born on April 4th, 1928. She lived during the Great Depression, but miraculously enough, she and her family thrived because her grandmother owned a store that sold basic necessities. Years later, she and her siblings were taken to live with their parents, where Angelou was abused by her mother’s boyfriend. When she told her relatives what was going on, the boyfriend was murdered, and she subsequently became mute for approximately five years. It was during this time that Angelou began developing a love for literature, and when she went back to live with her grandmother, she nourished that passion with authors like William Shakespeare and Edgar Allen Poe.

When Angelou grew older, she met John Oliver Killens, who urged her to move to New York to continue her writing. As a result, she met other writers like Paule Marshall and Rosa Guy. She later moved to Accra, Ghana, where she met the famous Malcolm X. However, due to personal circumstances, she had to keep traveling, before Martin Luther King Jr. asked her to help with a march.

In 1969, she soon published an autobiography called I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The book ties into themes such as identity and racism and gave black women a way to explore their own identity. It was one of the first pieces of American literature that depicted black women realistically and was praised from many critics including James Baldwin, who stated that her book was a “biblical study of life in the midst of death,” recommending it to women everywhere, specifically black women. Even so, due to the graphic nature of the book, many parents attempted to censor it and were somewhat successful with it. Despite its cultural importance, apparently, the memoir was named one of the top ten books that are frequently challenged and/or banned from the classroom.

She’s given her support to both Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton. In 2010, she donated many of her works to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. What’s more, she is regarded as one of the first African American writers to share her personal story and cement black literature into the general public’s eyes. She advocated for social justice and used her experience to craft narratives that are not only compelling but also relatable. Maya Angelou died on the morning of May 28, 2014.  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. However, she continues to inspire writers to fight for what they believe is right.