Maya Angelou's Life

Maya Angelou's life growing up was not always perfect. Given the birth name of Marguerite Ann Johnson, Maya Angelou was borin in St. Louis, Missouri on April 4th, 1928. Although she was born there, she spent most of her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas with her Grandmother, Annie Henderson and in San Fransico, California with her mother. Maya Angelou is still living today and teaches at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Maya had to deal with many hard things growing up and although it wasn't perfect, she's lead a very eventful life.

Maya never had a very functional family. Her mother, Vivian Baxter, was a nurse and realtor and her father Bailey Johnson was a navy dietician. When Maya was just 3 years old her parents divorced. Maya's father shipped her and 4 year old brother Bailey to live with his mother in Arkansas while their mother moved to California. Because her parents divorced when she was so young, Maya never really knew what a healthy relationshop looked like and in the long run this affected her own love life. In 1950, however, when Maya was just 22, she married Tosh Angelos, an ex-sailor. They didn't have much in common though and 3 years later they were divorced. Maya did have other relationships with men but they never seemed to work out. Although her relationships involving love weren't successful, her friendships were. In 1964, Maya met Malcolm X. The two became great friends and he even offered her a job to help him build a new civil rights organization, the Organization of African American Unity. Unfortunately, he was assassinated shortly after she began working with him. After Malcolm X's assasination, Martin Luther King Jr. contacted Maya and asked for her help to organize a march ...

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... people and Maya was subject to many racial slurs. This reflects in her writing and her poems. A theme that occurs in some of her poems is heartache. Maya was never very lucky in love and she dealt with that by writing poems. Another thing Maya portrays in her works is the power of woman.

An interesting fact about Maya Angelou is that although she has written novels and books, she has also written for movies. Maya wrote the screenplay and score for the movie "Georgia, Georgia." Her screenplay was the first ever done by an African American woman and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. She has also starred in the movie "Roots" and directed her first feature film "Down in the Delta" in 1996. Although Maya has honorary degrees and academic engagements, she does not have a college education. One of the many jobs Maya has had include a creole cook and a waiter.