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Maya Angelou Accomplishments

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On April 4th of 1928 Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri. She was given the name “Maya” by her brother, Bailey. Both Maya and Bailey were sent to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas after her parents divorced.
When Maya went to visit her mother at the age of eight she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. After testifying against him, several of her uncles beat the boyfriend to death in order to get revenge for what happened to her. Even though her grandmother helped her build her self-confidence, Maya felt guilty of causing his death by speaking his name so she stopped talking for about five years.
In 1944, a short high school relationship led to a pregnancy in which she gave birth to her son, Guy, at the age of 16. Six years later she married a greek …show more content…

Some of the awards that she has been nominated for and has even received include: Chubb Fellowship given by Yale University, Coretta Scott King Honor for African-American authors of books for young people, Tony Award Nomination for her role in Broadway play Look Away, Matrix Award given by New York Women in Communication, and many others.
Besides creating many inspiring poems Angelou also wrote many books in her time. One of her most known books is a memoir about her childhood called I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. After being convinced by her friend James Baldwin, who kept urging her to write about her devastating past and how she benefited from those experiences, she finally wrote the book which resulted to becoming one of her best autobiographical work. This book was also a very crucial part of how her fame came to be.
Another one of her autobiographical work is, A Song Flung Up to Heaven, which is about her trip from Ghana back to the United States and how she was struggling to cope with the assassinations of her two close friends Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm

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