Maya Angelou ** April 4/1928 -May 28/2014

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Maya Angelou, poet, performer, social activist, and autobiographer, who died on May 28 / 2014 , is widely credited with introducing many readers to the experience of being both black and female in the Jim Crow South.

Ms. Angelou was the author of six memoirs, including what is perhaps her most famous work, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” from 1969. Her work amounted to more than 30 titles, including multiple volumes of essays and poems.

She had, indeed, a lot to say – and lived life on a giant scale.

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Angelou

She had called some of America’s most famous figures her friends, and she had received some of its most prestigious honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the US. She had been written about, and she had written.

She had also been through hard times – born both black and female in an era and in a place in which both identities were targets for injustice and unkindness. But no dart was painful enough to stop her from enjoying her life, and she came through it all bearing for her readers and listeners a message not of hardened resilience, but of stubborn joy.

As she wrote in the poem “I Still Rise” 1978

Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops,

Weakened by my soulful cries?...

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.