Saying goodbye to Maya Angelou: an outstanding poet and activist
The American author and poet Maya Angelou has died aged 86. She was one of the greatest role models and activist who recorded the experience of being black in the United States.
Maya Angelour spent much of the next ten years growing up in one of America's poorest regions, experiencing tracial segregation, violence and prejudice.
Before becoming a writer, she worked as a singer, dancer, cocktail waitress. For a time she was also a sex worker. She wrote her first book in 1969 - an autobiography covering the early years of African-America - it was a bestseller.
Maya Angelou, who had met and worked with Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, once said:
"You will never love poetry until you actually feel it come across your tongue, through your teeth, over your lips."
She was a successful poet as well as a feature film, screenplay, and TV writer of blues and African heritage. In the 1980s she became an academic and professorof American studies at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.
She was a fervent believer that life was to be lived to the fullest:
"The excitement is not just to survive, but to thrive, and to thrive with some passion, some compassion, some humour and some style."
In 2010 Maya Angelour was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama.
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