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Summary
Summary
A seamless collaboration between renowned Inaugural poet Maya Angelou and Caldecott Award-winning illustrator Tom Feelings, this intensely sensuous work combines verse with sepia-toned illustrations in a beautiful paean to Black women.
Author Notes
Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4, 1928 in Saint Louis, Missouri. At the age of 16, she became not only the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco but the first woman conductor. In the mid-1950s, she toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess. In 1957, she recorded her first album, Calypso Lady. In 1958, she became a part of the Harlem Writers Guild in New York and played a queen in The Blacks, an off-Broadway production by French dramatist Jean Genet.
In 1960, she moved to Cairo, where she edited The Arab Observer, an English-language weekly newspaper. The following year, she went to Ghana where she was features editor of The African Review and taught music and drama at the University of Ghana. In 1964, she moved back to the U.S. to become a civil rights activist by helping Malcolm X build his new coalition, the Organization of African American Unity, and became the northern coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Even though she never went to college, she taught American studies for years at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem. In 1993, she became only the second poet in United States history to write and recite an original poem at a Presidential Inauguration when she read On the Pulse of Morning at President Bill Clinton's Inauguration Ceremony. She wrote numerous books during her lifetime including: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Die, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now, and Mom and Me and Mom. In 2011, President Barack Obama gave her the Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian honor, for her collected works of poetry, fiction and nonfiction.
She appeared in the movie Roots and was nominated for Best Supporting Actress in 1977 for her role in the movie. She also played a part in the movie, How to Make an American Quilt and wrote and produced Afro-Americans in the Arts, a PBS special for which she received a Golden Eagle Award. She was a three-time Grammy winner. She died on May 28, 2014 at the age of 86.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Feelings's 84 sepia and black-and-white illustrations of black women were drawn in Africa, the U.S., South America and the Caribbean. They inspired Angelou (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings to write this poem celebrating black women's strength, dignity, exuberance and sexuality. Pictures and verse complement each other in this slender offering. The sketches, by the children's book illustrator and Caldecott award winner, look, regrettably, as if they might be random jottings in an art student's sketchpad. The verses sometimes successfully mingle natural speech rhythms with a literarydiction that filters the voice of African-American woman's centuries of struggle and perseverance. An often eloquent poem is trapped amid prosaic pictures. (April 6) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Popular poet Angelou, author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Booklist 66:1256 Je 15 70) and All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (82:778 F 1 86) among other works, gets top billing, but the black-and-sepia tones of Tom Feelings' 84 drawings primarily portraits are the main attraction in this tribute to black women. The award-winning artist describes his subjects as ordinary but beautiful females whom he observed and sketched over a 25-year period in the Caribbean Islands, North and South America, and Africa. Feelings' essentially realistic depiction of faces and bodies, sometimes enhanced by tonal gradations and elsewhere modified by soft or blurred lines, illustrates physical and spiritual qualities that are concatenated by the poet's sparse, often strong, images: ``peanut butter colored cheeks . . . impertinent buttocks . . . A moan for our burned visions . . . We have played together on the floor of the world.'' A combination of accessible art and poetry that's likely to be requested in public libraries. PMS. 811'.54 [CIP] 86-19876
