Mom & Me & Mom: tribute by Maya Angelou

Angelou has given us the opportunity to read much of her life, but here she unveils her relationship with her mother for the first time. True to her style, the writing cuts to the chase with compression and simplicity, and there in the background is a calypso smoothness, flurries and showers of musicality between the moments of wickedness. And wickedness abounds, for Angelou had a knack for picking bad men. But the pivot of the book is her mother--first called lady, then mother and finally mom--who sent Angelou and her brother to live with their grandmother when Angelou was 3. By the time her older brother was capable of getting into serious trouble as an independent-minded black man in the American South, they were shipped back to their mother, who was as ready as she would ever be. She had been around, ran a few gambling houses and picked up plenty of worldly wisdom, which she dispensed to Angelou: "Power and determination…with those two things, you can go anywhere and everywhere"; "If you don't protect yourself, you look like a fool asking somebody else to protect you." Though readers may not sense that her mother was not the most reliable force in her life, Angelou knew enough to grab the most from what she had: "She was there with me. She had my back, supported me. This is the role of the mother….She stands between the known and the unknown." Strung through the narrative are intense episodes in Angelou's personal progress, from those disappointing-to-terrifying boyfriends, a seriously ugly meeting with her father and stepmother, her days as a prostitute and her incandescent relationships with her brother and her son. A tightly strung, finely tuned memoir about life with her mother. (Kirkus Reviews)

Past interview with ABCNews:

USPS to Honor Maya Angelou with a Forever Stamp

"Maya Angelou inspired our nation through a life of advocacy and through her many contributions to the written and spoken word," said Postmaster General Megan J. Brennan. "Her wide-ranging achievements as a playwright, poet, memoirist, educator, and advocate for justice and equality enhanced our culture."

Check out the Community Library's extensive selection of Maya Angelou's work. Can't locate what you're looking for? Ask a librarian for assistance, we love to help!

In Memoriam

Walter Dean Myers

From the Tuesday, December 30th issue of Shelf Awareness: 

"As the year comes to an end, we'd like to honor a few of the authors we lost in 2014.

Former U.S. poet laureate Mark Strand, "whose spare, deceptively simple investigations of rootlessness, alienation and the ineffable strangeness of life made him one of America's most hauntingly meditative poets." He was named poet laureate in 1990 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1999 for Blizzard of One.

Novelist Kent Haruf, who wrote quiet, moving novels that take place in the fictional town of Holt, Colo. His novel Plainsong (1999) was a finalist for the National Book Award, and his most recent book,Benediction (2013), was on the shortlist for this year's Folio Prize.

Zilpha Keatley Snyder, who wrote nearly 50 books, including The Egypt Game (1967). The New York Times described her as having "mined memories of little demons at the foot of her childhood bed to spin tales of wonder, mystery and suspense that beguiled two generations of children and young adults."

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and political scientist James MacGregor Burns, "who wrote voluminously about the nature of leadership in general and the presidency in particular." He wrote more than 20 books, including Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (1970), which won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award.

Memoirist and poet Maya Angelou, "whose landmark book of 1969, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings--a lyrical, unsparing account of her childhood in the Jim Crow South--was among the first autobiographies by a 20th-century black woman to reach a wide general readership.

"Walter Dean Myers, beloved and deeply respected children's book author. In a career spanning over 45 years, he wrote more than 100 books, including two Newbery Honor books, three National Book Award finalists and six Coretta Scott King Award/Honor-winning books.

P.D. James, the beloved mystery author and creator of Commander Adam Dalgliesh and Cordelia Gray, who famously said, "When I first heard that Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall, I immediately wondered: Did he fall--or was he pushed?"" 

Click here to access the article.