46 Fun Facts About Maya Angelou

What was Maya Angelou's birth name?

Marguerite Annie Johnson worked for a white employer in Caged Bird who insisted on calling her Mary, and she took her revenge by breaking the woman's dishes.

In which city was Angelou born in 1928?

St. Louis, Missouri, was her birthplace, but when her parents split, her father sent the children alone by train to their grandmother in Arkansas.

Who first called Angelou by the nickname that became her famous first name?

Her older brother, Bailey Jr., coined it; in the family telling he called her 'My', for 'my sister', which grew into 'Maya'.

In which Arkansas town did Angelou grow up with her paternal grandmother?

Stamps had a white dentist who, she wrote in Caged Bird, refused to treat her toothache even though her grandmother had once lent him money.

Why did the young Angelou stop speaking for years after being raped?

She blamed her voice for a death: after she named her attacker he was murdered, and she feared speaking again might kill someone else.

Which educated woman coaxed the silent young Angelou into speaking again?

Mrs. Flowers had her read aloud from writers such as Dickens and Shakespeare, giving the girl a lasting love of the spoken word.

As a teenager, Angelou became the first Black woman to hold which job in San Francisco?

Streetcar conductor was her dream job because she loved the uniforms, with their money-changer belts, billed caps and fitted jackets.

What event closes Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings?

Her son's birth closes the book; in the years that followed she supported him with jobs that included fry cook and nightclub shake dancer.

Angelou's first husband, a former sailor and aspiring musician, was of what descent?

Greek-descended Tosh Angelos lent her the surname she reshaped into 'Angelou', and she kept it for life even after they divorced.

In the early 1950s, Angelou formed a modern-dance act with which future dance legend?

Alvin Ailey and Angelou billed their act as 'Al and Rita', and decades later she read a poem at his 1989 memorial service.

At which San Francisco nightclub did Angelou sing and dance when she adopted her professional name?

The Purple Onion billed her alongside another future star, the comedian Phyllis Diller, and the two became friends.

With which opera production did Angelou tour Europe in 1954-55?

Porgy and Bess took her across Europe, where she set about learning the languages she heard on tour; she went on to become proficient in several.

Which album did Angelou record in 1957, during her years as a nightclub singer?

Miss Calypso drew a Billboard review saying her nightclub dates had made her name 'a rising commodity'.

Which organisation did Angelou join after moving to New York in the late 1950s?

The Harlem Writers Guild drew her in after novelist John Oliver Killens urged her to take her writing seriously.

After hearing Martin Luther King Jr. speak, Angelou staged Cabaret for Freedom to raise money for which group?

The SCLC, which King helped found and led as its first president, went on to make her its Northern Coordinator.

In the 1993 film Poetic Justice, which singer plays a poet whose verses were written by Angelou?

Janet Jackson's co-star Tupac Shakur got into a row on set, and Angelou, who by her own account had no idea who he was, talked him down until he wept.

In which city did Angelou work as associate editor of the English-language weekly The Arab Observer?

Cairo is where she had followed South African freedom fighter Vusumzi Make, bringing along her son, Guy.

In which sub-Saharan country did Angelou live for several years in the early 1960s?

Ghana is where her son, Guy, was seriously injured in a car accident, and it was there that he stayed on to recover.

Angelou returned to the US in the mid-1960s to help which leader build the Organization of Afro-American Unity?

Malcolm X was assassinated shortly after her return, and the new organisation disbanded after his death.

King was killed on Angelou's birthday in 1968; what did she do on her birthday for years afterward?

Sent flowers to his widow, Coretta Scott King, instead of celebrating, a ritual she kept up for decades.

Angelou kept one editor, Robert Loomis, for her whole career; at which publisher did he work?

Random House employed Loomis from 1957 until he retired in 2011, and he coaxed her into writing Caged Bird after she first turned the idea down.

Whose poem gave Angelou's Caged Bird its title?

Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem 'Sympathy' gave her the title, and she later took a memoir title, A Song Flung Up to Heaven, from the same poem.

Whose death inspired Angelou's 'His Day Is Done'?

Nelson Mandela's death in 2013 moved her to write it, and the US State Department released a video of her reading the tribute on behalf of the American people.

In the 1973 Broadway play Look Away, Angelou played a dressmaker and confidante to which First Lady?

Mary Todd Lincoln's story closed after a single Broadway performance, yet Angelou's turn as her dressmaker still earned a Tony nomination.

Angelou's husband Paul du Feu, a Welsh carpenter, had previously been married to which writer?

Germaine Greer had split from him within weeks of their wedding, and he later posed nude for British Cosmopolitan.

In which 1977 television mini-series did Angelou appear in a supporting role?

Around the same time she met a Baltimore TV anchor named Oprah Winfrey, who became a lifelong friend.

At which university did Angelou teach for about three decades as a professor of American studies?

Wake Forest first hosted her for a 1973 campus talk; she said she needed to come to terms with her past in the South, and she later joined its faculty for good.

Which poem did Angelou recite at Bill Clinton's first inauguration in 1993?

She was the first inaugural poet since 1961, and the recording won a Grammy.

Who was the last poet to recite at a presidential inauguration before Angelou in 1993?

Robert Frost had written a new poem for Kennedy's 1961 inauguration, but the sun's glare stopped him reading it, so he recited an older one from memory.

Angelou's poem 'A Brave and Startling Truth' marked the 50th anniversary of what in 1995?

The United Nations poem later left Earth altogether: months after her death, NASA flew it aboard the Orion spacecraft's 2014 test flight.

Which R&B duo, who wrote Motown's 'Ain't No Mountain High Enough', made the 1996 album Been Found with Angelou?

Ashford & Simpson's album with her was born over a shared dinner, when some casual music-making that evening grew into a whole record.

For which company did Angelou create a line of greeting cards and household items?

Hallmark's range drew charges that she was too commercial, and she answered that putting her words on cards suited her role as 'the people's poet'.

Whom did Angelou first endorse in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries?

Hillary Clinton kept her backing until the campaign ended, and only then did Angelou go over to Obama.

Which Harlem institution acquired more than 340 boxes of Angelou's papers in 2010?

The Schomburg Center was her own pick: she said libraries had been her refuge as a child, and she wanted her papers somewhere anyone could read them.

What became of the Martin Luther King memorial inscription that Angelou criticised as a misquote?

It was removed: officials first ordered the shortened line corrected, then announced that the words would come off the stone altogether and not be replaced.

What was the title of Angelou's seventh autobiography, published in 2013?

Mom & Me & Mom tells how, angry at being sent away as a small child, she refused to call her mother 'Mother' and took to calling her 'Lady' instead.

Which drink did Angelou keep in the bare hotel room she rented for writing?

A bottle of sherry sat beside a dictionary and a Bible, and she had the room stripped of pictures and decoration so nothing would distract her.

Angelou said she agreed with which 19th-century novelist, and other writers of his era, who say 'I write for money'?

Balzac was her answer to critics of how she turned her own life into books and products.

Where did I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings rank on the ALA's list of most challenged books of the 1990s?

Third place put it behind only Scary Stories and Daddy's Roommate; in some school districts, parents objected to teenagers reading her account of being raped as a child.

Which Angelou collection earned a Pulitzer nomination?

Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie earned the nod even though critics were often cool on her verse, praising its message more than its craft.

Which honour did Barack Obama present to Angelou in 2011?

The Presidential Medal of Freedom came from a president whose mother had named his sister Maya in Angelou's honour.

In 2022 Angelou became the first Black woman to appear on which US coin?

She was among the first women in the American Women quarters series.

A 2008 DNA test put 55 percent of Angelou's African ancestry in which region?

West Africa led her African results; the same research found a white forebear, John Savin, who was tried for pressing her ancestor Mary Lee to lie about who fathered her child, and was acquitted.

Angelou's cookbook The Welcome Table pairs its recipes with what?

Life stories come with the recipes, including how at 17 she talked her way into a job as a Creole cook by claiming experience she did not have.

Which gossip website wrongly reported in 2009 that Maya Angelou had been hospitalised, sparking death rumours?

She was alive and well in her home state at the time.

Despite having no university degree, what honorific did she prefer non-family to use?

She had more than fifty honorary degrees to justify it.