Salem State College Series

"An Evening with Maya Angelou"
Draws Standing Room Only Audience

Maya Angelou with student leaders from
Multicultural Student Association

A sold-out crowd was mesmerized by Dr. Maya Angelou on November 5 when she spoke, sang---and yes, even rapped---about each of us ‘finding rainbows in our clouds.' A highlight of the evening was Dr. Angelou's reading of "A Brave and Startling Truth" which she wrote for the 50th anniversary of the United Nations.

A Brief Biography

Maya Angelou has been hailed as one of the great voices of contemporary black literature, a towering civil rights activist and a true Renaissance woman. A mesmerizing and powerful speaker, she is one of those rare voices capable of shattering the opaque prisms of race and class, and her success in nearly every endeavor she has undertaken has elevated her to the status of one of this country's true national treasures.

Author of numerous books, several of which earned her Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominations, Angelou was one of the first African-American women in this country to see her published works included on best-seller lists. In 1993, Dr. Angelou became only the second poet in U.S. history to be accorded the honor of writing and reciting original work at a presidential inauguration. "On the Pulse of Morning", the poem she wrote for, and read so eloquently at President Clinton's inauguration, gave her wide recognition and won her a Grammy Award for best spoken word recording.

In the sixties, at the request of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Dr. Angelou became the northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and in 1975 she received the Ladies Home Journal Woman of the Year Award in communications.

Dr. Angelou, who is a lifetime Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, continues to lecture frequently throughout the United States and abroad.