Maya Angelou Trivia
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46 free Maya Angelou trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Maya Angelou trivia quiz covers the memoirist and poet behind I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, from a childhood in Stamps, Arkansas to the podium at Bill Clinton's inauguration. The easy questions cover the famous first autobiography, the inaugural poem, the friendship with Oprah Winfrey, the appearance in Roots and the 2022 quarter. From there it moves through an extraordinary life: the brother who gave her the name Maya, the five years of silence, the teacher who said 'you do not love poetry until you speak it', the streetcar job at 16, the Purple Onion, the Porgy and Bess tour, the Harlem Writers Guild, Cairo, Accra and Malcolm X. The harder end covers the album Miss Calypso, the Cabaret for Freedom, the screenplay filmed in Sweden, the Tony nomination, the Wake Forest professorship she held without a degree, the hotel-room writing ritual with sherry and a deck of cards, the seven autobiographies, and the King memorial quote she called an 'arrogant twit' paraphrase. Every answer was checked against Angelou's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our poetry and Black history quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What was Maya Angelou's birth name?
Marguerite Annie Johnson
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.
Q 02In which city was Angelou born in 1928?
St. Louis, Missouri
St. Louis, Missouri, was her birthplace, but when her parents split, her father sent the children alone by train to their grandmother in Arkansas.
Q 03Who first called Angelou by the nickname that became her famous first name?
Her older brother
Her older brother, Bailey Jr., coined it; in the family telling he called her 'My', for 'my sister', which grew into 'Maya'.
Q 04In which Arkansas town did Angelou grow up with her paternal grandmother?
Stamps
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.
Q 05Why did the young Angelou stop speaking for years after being raped?
She blamed her voice for a death
She blamed her voice for a death: after she named her attacker he was murdered, and she feared speaking again might kill someone else.
Q 06Which educated woman coaxed the silent young Angelou into speaking again?
Mrs. Flowers
Mrs. Flowers had her read aloud from writers such as Dickens and Shakespeare, giving the girl a lasting love of the spoken word.
Q 07As a teenager, Angelou became the first Black woman to hold which job in San Francisco?
Streetcar conductor
Streetcar conductor was her dream job because she loved the uniforms, with their money-changer belts, billed caps and fitted jackets.
Q 08What event closes Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings?
Her son's birth
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.
Q 09Angelou's first husband, a former sailor and aspiring musician, was of what descent?
Greek
Greek-descended Tosh Angelos lent her the surname she reshaped into 'Angelou', and she kept it for life even after they divorced.
Q 10In the early 1950s, Angelou formed a modern-dance act with which future dance legend?
Alvin Ailey
Alvin Ailey and Angelou billed their act as 'Al and Rita', and decades later she read a poem at his 1989 memorial service.
Q 11At which San Francisco nightclub did Angelou sing and dance when she adopted her professional name?
The Purple Onion
The Purple Onion billed her alongside another future star, the comedian Phyllis Diller, and the two became friends.
Q 12With which opera production did Angelou tour Europe in 1954-55?
Porgy and Bess
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.
Q 13Which album did Angelou record in 1957, during her years as a nightclub singer?
Miss Calypso
Miss Calypso drew a Billboard review saying her nightclub dates had made her name 'a rising commodity'.
Q 21Angelou kept one editor, Robert Loomis, for her whole career; at which publisher did he work?
Random House
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.
Q 22Whose poem gave Angelou's Caged Bird its title?
Paul Laurence Dunbar
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.
Q 23Whose death inspired Angelou's 'His Day Is Done'?
Nelson Mandela
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.
Q 14Which organisation did Angelou join after moving to New York in the late 1950s?
The Harlem Writers Guild
The Harlem Writers Guild drew her in after novelist John Oliver Killens urged her to take her writing seriously.
Q 15After hearing Martin Luther King Jr. speak, Angelou staged Cabaret for Freedom to raise money for which group?
SCLC
The SCLC, which King helped found and led as its first president, went on to make her its Northern Coordinator.
Q 16In the 1993 film Poetic Justice, which singer plays a poet whose verses were written by Angelou?
Janet Jackson
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.
Q 17In which city did Angelou work as associate editor of the English-language weekly The Arab Observer?
Cairo
Cairo is where she had followed South African freedom fighter Vusumzi Make, bringing along her son, Guy.
Q 18In which sub-Saharan country did Angelou live for several years in the early 1960s?
Ghana
Ghana is where her son, Guy, was seriously injured in a car accident, and it was there that he stayed on to recover.
Q 19Angelou returned to the US in the mid-1960s to help which leader build the Organization of Afro-American Unity?
Malcolm X
Malcolm X was assassinated shortly after her return, and the new organisation disbanded after his death.
Q 20King was killed on Angelou's birthday in 1968; what did she do on her birthday for years afterward?
Sent flowers to his widow
Sent flowers to his widow, Coretta Scott King, instead of celebrating, a ritual she kept up for decades.
Q 24In the 1973 Broadway play Look Away, Angelou played a dressmaker and confidante to which First Lady?
Mary Todd Lincoln
Mary Todd Lincoln's story closed after a single Broadway performance, yet Angelou's turn as her dressmaker still earned a Tony nomination.
Q 25Angelou's husband Paul du Feu, a Welsh carpenter, had previously been married to which writer?
Germaine Greer
Germaine Greer had split from him within weeks of their wedding, and he later posed nude for British Cosmopolitan.
Q 26In which 1977 television mini-series did Angelou appear in a supporting role?
Roots
Around the same time she met a Baltimore TV anchor named Oprah Winfrey, who became a lifelong friend.
Q 27At which university did Angelou teach for about three decades as a professor of American studies?
Wake Forest
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.
Q 28Which poem did Angelou recite at Bill Clinton's first inauguration in 1993?
'On the Pulse of Morning'
She was the first inaugural poet since 1961, and the recording won a Grammy.
Q 29Who was the last poet to recite at a presidential inauguration before Angelou in 1993?
Robert Frost
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.
Q 30Angelou's poem 'A Brave and Startling Truth' marked the 50th anniversary of what in 1995?
The United Nations
The United Nations poem later left Earth altogether: months after her death, NASA flew it aboard the Orion spacecraft's 2014 test flight.