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Poetess Maya Angelou has published a seven-part autobiography, three non-fiction books, and numerous collections of poetry, as well as children's books, plays, screenplays, and television programs. She has received dozens of awards and more than fifty honorary degrees.
Maya Angelou is best known for the seven autobiographies focused on her adolescent and early maturity experiences. With her first autobiography, The Song of Silence, in which she recounts her life up to the age of seventeen, she met with enormous success and international acclaim.
In addition to the copious amount of doctorates received from universities, Maya Angelou has won numerous literary and civil rights awards, state and individual interest group honors. She was a finalist for, among other things, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry with her first collection of poetry Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie.
She earned a Tony Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress in Jerome Kilty's stage drama Look Away. She has won three Grammy Awards for Best Talking Album. She has twice served as a member of committees and commissions of the United States Presidency, and was awarded the National Medal of the Arts by Congress in 2000 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2011.
Maya Angelou hits a super prank on Saturday Night Live
Unwed mother at seventeen, Angelou has held the most diverse jobs of hers, including the tram driver, the waitress, the cook, the procuress, the prostitute, the stripper, the dancer, the singer.
Cast in George Gershwin's play Porgy and Bess, journalist in Egypt and teacher in Ghana during decolonization, coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for civil rights, composer, writer , actress, author, director and producer of plays and television programs.
Since 1982 she has been a professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she holds the Reynolds Chair as the first lifetime professor in American studies. Active in the civil rights movement, she worked alongside Malcolm X, whom she met in Ghana, and, after his assassination, with Martin Luther King.
Since the 1990s she has attended about eighty conferences a year, activities she has continued to do even in her eighties. In 1993 Maya Angelou delivered her poem On the Pulse of Morning at Bill Clinton's inauguration ceremony, making her the first poet to recite her own poem at the presidential inauguration since Robert Frost read his own verse during John F.
Kennedy's inauguration. Here is the hilarious video of the prank hit by Maya Angelou hits to Saturday Night Live: