Maya Angelou | featured news

“My mother was irresistible,” Maya Angelou says, but “irresistible” is also a word that many readers have applied to Angelou herself. She is a one-woman autobiography industry, as well as a poet, playwright and performer, but mostly she is a Large Public Presence. Her best-known work, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” a harrowing account of her muteness after she was raped as a child, is still widely taught.

Poet, writer, civil rights activist, professor, filmmaker, dramatist, singer, Grammy Award winner: Maya Angelou, 83, has also been called the nation’s premier memoirist. She was in Washington last week speaking about her long, rich life.

Even for a venue as grand as New York's Carnegie Hall, there was a pretty dazzling concentration of star power at Glamour magazine's Women of the Year awards....