She wasn’t a complex writer, but her work had a realness and deceptive simplicity that made it highly accessible to a wide readership.

Some writers have that ability to touch places in us that few are able to touch.

She was that vibrant, that rich, that fervent, that knowing. She staked that claim for many women, from her “adopted” daughter, Oprah Winfrey, to American high school students reading her for the first time. When I read the breaking news alert that she had died, I felt a frisson of loss as if she were my own family–she and her work had always been that much of a steady presence in my life, even if she was on its periphery. The world of second-class-ness that never leaves us, no matter how accomplished or famous or revered one is.Īnd she was all of those things, she was all of them. There was always that blurred dark edge to every tale that is the line most women walk between the world outside and the world inside. Angelou had a deep voice and a big, easy laugh and those two things accompanied all her telling, soothing some of the truths she exposed. I rarely heard her speak or give an interview without tears coming to my eyes because she never spoke of easy things, even when she was telling a funny story, which was often, because humor and sadness were of a piece for her both in life and in her writing. Maya Angelou always made me feel just a bit cut open. She was 86.Īngelou wrote, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Maya Angelou, poet, memoirist, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, Calypso singer and dancer in gay clubs in 1950s San Francisco, part of a dance duo with Alvin Ailey, colleague and civil rights worker with both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., best friend to James Baldwin, first black Inaugural poet, friend and supporter of lesbians and gay men before it was trendy or popular and when it most mattered–that Maya Angelou died Wednesday morning, May 28 at her home in Winston-Salem, NC.

And Still I Rise: A Tribute to Maya Angelou

Maya angelou rise quote