Maya Angelou (/ˈæn.dʒə.loʊ/ ^ⓘ AN-jə-loh; born Marguerite Annie Johnson; April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014) was an American memoirist, essayist, poet, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. She received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees. Angelou's series of seven autobiographies focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of 17 and brought her international recognition and acclaim.

She became a poet and writer after a string of odd jobs during her young adulthood. In 1982, Angelou was named the first Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Angelou was active in the Civil Rights Movement and worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Beginning in the 1990s, she made approximately 80 appearances a year on the lecture circuit, something she continued into her eighties. In 1993, Angelou recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" (1993) at the first inauguration of Bill Clinton, making her the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961.

With the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou publicly discussed aspects of her personal life. She was respected as a spokesperson for Black people and women, and her works have been considered a defense of Black culture. Her works are widely used in schools and universities worldwide, although attempts have been made to ban her books from some U.S. libraries. Angelou's most celebrated works have been labeled as autobiographical fiction, but many critics consider them to be autobiographies. She made a deliberate attempt to challenge the common structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre. Her books center on themes that include racism, identity, family, and travel.

Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, the younger of two children of Bailey Johnson, a doorman and navy dietitian, and Vivian (née Baxter) Johnson, a nurse and card dealer. For the first three years of her life, her family lived in her maternal grandparents home. Angelou's older brother, Bailey Jr., nicknamed Marguerite "Maya", derived from "My" or "Mya Sister". When Angelou was three and her brother four, their parents' "calamitous marriage" ended, and their father sent them to Stamps, Arkansas, alone by train, to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson. In "an astonishing exception" to the harsh economics of African Americans of the time, Angelou's grandmother prospered financially during the Great Depression and World War II, because the general store she owned sold basic and needed commodities and because "she made wise and honest investments".

Four years later, when Angelou was seven and her brother eight, the children's father "came to Stamps without warning" and returned them to their mother's care in St. Louis. At the age of eight, while living with her mother, Angelou was sexually abused and raped by her mother's boyfriend, a man named Freeman. She told her brother, who told the rest of their family. Freeman was found guilty but was jailed for only one day. Four days after his release, he was murdered, probably by Angelou's uncles. Angelou became mute for almost five years, believing she was to blame for his death; as she stated: "I thought, my voice killed him; I killed that man, because I told his name. And then I thought I would never speak again, because my voice would kill anyone." According to Marcia Ann Gillespie and her colleagues, who wrote a biography about Angelou, it was during this period of silence when Angelou developed her extraordinary memory, her love for books and literature, and her ability to listen and observe the world around her.

To know her life story is to simultaneously wonder what on earth you have been doing with your own life and feel glad that you didn't have to go through half the things she has.

Shortly after Freeman's murder, when Angelou was eight and her brother nine, Angelou and her brother were sent back to their grandmother. She attended the Lafayette County Training School, in Stamps, a Rosenwald School. Angelou credits a teacher and friend of her family, Mrs. Bertha Flowers, with helping her speak again, challenging her by saying: "You do not love poetry, not until you speak it." Flowers introduced her to Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson, authors who would affect Angelou's life and career, as well as Black female artists such as Frances Harper, Anne Spencer, and Jessie Fauset.

When Angelou was 14 and her brother 15, she and her brother moved in once again with their mother, who had since moved to Oakland, California. During World War II, Angelou attended the California Labor School. At the age of 16, she became the first Black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco. She wanted the job badly, admiring the uniforms of the operators, describing the women in uniform as having “their little money-changing belts and with bibs on their caps and well-fitted uniforms” —so much so that her mother referred to it as her "dream job". Her mother encouraged her to pursue the position, but warned her that she would need to arrive early and work harder than others. In 2014, Angelou received a lifetime achievement award from the Conference of Minority Transportation Officials as part of a session billed "Women Who Move the Nation".