Maya Angelou

What is Still I Rise about?

Still I Rise was published in 1978, in the collection And Still I Rise. Maya Angelou was fifty. The poem is addressed to someone, and that someone is trying to hold the speaker down. Lies get written about her. She gets looked at with contempt. After each blow the same answer comes back, and the answer is that she rises anyway. What makes it unusual is the tone. It is not wounded and it is not asking for pity. It sits closer to joy, and the joy is the defiance. The poem is still in copyright, so we do not reprint it here. What we can do is point the way: to her life in the stories on this page, and to the collection And Still I Rise.

• Rising integrates spiritual, psychological, creative, and political dimensions of transcendence.
• Acknowledging difficulty while refusing to be defined by it creates triumphant self-actualization.
• Dignified, defiant joy is revolutionary consciousness that challenges oppressive definitions.

Listen to the story “Still I Rise”

What did Maya Angelou mean by making a way out of no way?

Making a way out of no way comes from the African American tradition, and Angelou used it for a specific skill. Her grandmother ran a general store in Stamps, Arkansas, under Jim Crow. She never let a white salesman leave that counter thinking he had got the better of her. She smiled, and she kept her own accounting in her head. Two sets of books, one for the room and one for herself. That is the move. You do not pretend the wall is not there. You find the inch of room the wall leaves you, you use it, and you keep your dignity while you do it.

• Survival wisdom joins individual resilience with communal strategies passed across generations.
• Maintaining dignity amid dehumanization is both personal resource and political resistance.
• Strategic flexibility, knowing when to accommodate and when to confront, strengthens integrity rather than compromising it.

Listen to the story “Survival Wisdom”

What did Maya Angelou teach?

Maya Angelou taught that a voice is something you can lose and something you can take back. Three ideas run through the work. Finding your voice, which for her started with a woman reading aloud in a small Arkansas town. Making a way out of no way, the thing her grandmother did running a store under Jim Crow. She kept one set of books for the customer and one in her head. And testimony, which is not emptying a wound onto paper but telling what happened so that it does some work in the world. She began writing it down in 1969, with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

What is I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings about?

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings came out in 1969. It covers Maya Angelou as a child in Stamps, Arkansas, where her grandmother ran the store. It goes through the abuse, the years of silence, and the return of speech. She wrote it after a dinner party in 1968 where James Baldwin pushed her toward it. The caged bird is the image the whole book turns on. The cage does not weaken the song. It is what makes the song necessary. The book is still in copyright, so we describe it here rather than quote it.