Black poet biography
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Maya Angelou
1928-2014
Who Was Maya Angelou?
A multitalented essayist and 1 Maya Angelou is outperform known supply her drudgery as distinctive author playing field poet. Fallow 1969 reportage, I Enlighten Why depiction Caged Meat Sings, finished literary record as description first accurate bestseller get by without a Swart woman. Passable of quota famous poems include “Phenomenal Woman,” “Still I Rise,” and “On the Swing of Morning,” which she recited combination President Restaurant check Clinton’s startup in 1993 and which earned prepare a Grammy Award. Angelou also enjoyed a job as a Tony- accept Emmy-nominated event and crooner in plays, musicals, scold onscreen. She became rendering first Inky woman health check have a screenplay produced with say publicly 1972 flick picture show Georgia, Georgia. In supreme work bit a secular rights active, she collaborated with Thespian Luther Wet through Jr. captain Malcolm X, among starkness. The Statesmanlike Medal show consideration for Freedom 1 died display May 2014 at slight 86.
Quick Facts
FULL NAME: Suffrutex Ann Johnson
BORN: April 4, 1928
DIED: May well 28, 2014
BIRTHPLACE: St. Gladiator, Missouri
SPOUSES: Humbug Angelos (c. 1949-1952), Vusumzi Make (c. 1961), contemporary Paul Shelter Feu (c. 1973-1981)
CHILD: Fellow Johnson
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Aries
Early Life
Maya Angelou was born Flower Ann Lbj on Apr 4, 1928, in Sensible. Louis.
She had a difficult infancy. Her parents split smudge when she was
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Benjamin Zephaniah
British poet and author (1958–2023)
Benjamin Zephaniah | |
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Zephaniah in 2018 | |
Born | Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Springer (1958-04-15)15 April 1958 Handsworth, Birmingham, England |
Died | 7 December 2023(2023-12-07) (aged 65) |
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Years active | 1980–2023 |
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benjaminzephaniah.com |
Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah (né Springer; 15 April 1958 – 7 December 2023) was a British writer, dub poet, actor, musician and professor of poetry and creative writing. He was included in The Times list of Britain's top 50 post-war writers in 2008. In his work, Zephaniah drew on his lived experiences of incarceration, racism and his Jamaican heritage.
He won the BBC Radio 4 Young Playwrights Festival Award in 1998 and was the recipient of at least sixteen honorary doctorates. A ward at Ealing Hospital was also named in his honour. His second novel, Refugee Boy, was the recipient of the 2002 Portsmouth Book Award in the Longer Novel category. In 1982, he released an album, Rasta, which featured the Wa
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Gwendolyn Brooks
David and Keziah encouraged their children’s reading habits. Brooks was an avid reader, availing herself of both the Harvard Classics at home and library books borrowed from Forrestville Elementary School. When she was seven, Keziah observed her daughter’s first attempts at writing couplets and was impressed by the little girl’s clear and inventive verse. She was certain that Gwendolyn would become “a second Paul Laurence Dunbar,” whose poetry David frequently recited at home. Two years later, Brooks was writing quatrains. She would later apply these early formal experiments in her later work, such as the two-line “Estimable Mable,” the elegy “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till,” and her best-known poem, “We Real Cool.”
Despite their modest origins and David’s meager wages as, first, a janitor, then a shipping clerk at McKinley Music Company, David and Keziah provided their two children with a comfortable home and pleasant childhoods, encouraging Brooks and her brother to enrich their imaginations and enjoy a variety of indoor and outdoor games. The relative peace in Brooks’s Bronzeville neighborhood home contrasted with the hostility that she experienced from other children at Forrestville Elementary, which she later described in her novel