Maya Angelou

Born Marguerite Annie Johnson in 1928, she came to poetry and writing through a string of odd jobs in young adulthood, then published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in 1969 - an autobiography running to age 17 that brought international recognition and redrew the form itself, critiquing and expanding the genre by centering racism, identity, and travel. She worked alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X during the Civil Rights Movement, wrote six more autobiographies and several books of poetry, and in 1982 became the first Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest. By the 1990s she was making 80 appearances a year on the lecture circuit, a pace she kept into her eighties, and her works - taught worldwide, banned in some U.S. libraries, respected as both defense of African-American culture and voice for women - became fixtures of classrooms. She died in 2014, decades after the caged bird first sang.