Featured Poet: Maya Angelou
(April 4, 1928 - May 28, 2014)
Quote: "If you are always trying to live normal you will never know how amazing you can be." Dr. Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4, 1928. Sadly, she was raped as a child by her mother's boyfriend, Freeman. He was charged with rape and released the next day. Freeman was killed, and Angelou blamed herself. She believed her voice killed Freeman and would not speak for nearly five years. During her years of silence, Angelou developed a love for literature.
She found her voice again and later became one of the most powerful orators alive. Although she is no longer here, her voice is heard through her poems, interviews, plays, movies, and books. She is known for her empowering poem “Phenomenal Woman" and one of her many books, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings".
African American Poetry Books in the McWherter Library
- 3000 years of black poetry: an anthology/edited by Alan Lomax and Raoul Abdul
- African-American poetry of the nineteenth century: an anthology/ edited by Joan R. Sherman
- Black nature: four centuries of African American nature poetry / edited by Camille T. Dungy
- The black unicorn: poems / by Audre Lorde
- The furious flowering of African American poetry by edited Joanne V. Gabbin
- The Negro speaks of rivers by Langston Hughes with illustrations E.B. Lewis
- The poems of Jean Toomer edited by Robert B. Jones and Margery Toomer Latimer; with an introduction and textual notes by Robert B. Jones
- The complete collected poems of Maya Angelou by Maya Angelou
- I, too, am America by Langston Hughes
- Pass it on: African-American poetry for children / selected by Wade Hudson; illustrated by Floyd Cooper
- Poems of Phyllis Wheatley: a native African and a slave by Phyllis Wheatley
- Words with wings: a treasury of African-American poetry and art /selected by Belinda Rochelle
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