Wouldn't Take Nothing For My Journey Now
by Maya Angelou

List Price: $5.99
Pages: 139
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0553569074
Publisher: Bantam Books

On April 4, 1928, Maya Angelou was born Marguerita Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri. Her parents soon divorced and she was sent to live with her grandmother in rural Arkansas, where she spent most of her early childhood. During a visit to St. Louis when she was eight years old, Angelou was raped by her mother's boyfriend, whom her uncles subsequently killed. Angelou did not speak for some years after.

In 1940, Angelou moved to San Francisco with her mother. While attending high school, she became pregnant and gave birth to a son in 1945, just after receiving her diploma. To support her child and herself, she worked several odd jobs. While appearing as a dancer in a cabaret, she changed her name to Angelou. Her experience there led to an acting and singing career and she joined a cast performing "Porgy and Bess" throughout Europe.

When she was thirty, Angelou moved to New York and joined the Harlem Writers Guild, where she met James Baldwin. She became involved in the civil rights movement, serving as the northern coordinator for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference from 1959 to 1960. She later moved to Egypt, where she edited an English-language newspaper, and then to Ghana, working as a writer and editor.

In 1970, Angelou published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. An account of her childhood up to the birth of her son, it is her most critically-acclaimed work and was nominated for a National Book Award. She went on to write Gather Together in My Name, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, The Heart of a Woman, and Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now. Her acclaimed works of poetry include Maya Angelou: Poems and I Shall Not Be Moved.

In film and television, Angelou wrote the original screenplay and musical score for the film "Georgia, Georgia," and wrote and produced a ten-part television series on African traditions in American life, and participated as guest interviewer for the Public Broadcasting System program "Assignment America." One of the few women members of the Directors Guild, she is the author of the television screenplays I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and The Sisters.

In January 1993, Maya Angelou became the first woman and the first African-American to read her work at a presidential inauguration. Her inaugural poem "On the Pulse of the Morning" celebrates the diversity of the American and world communities and calls on them to work together to create a better future. She currently lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she is Reynolds Professor at Wake Forest University.

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