Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 19, 1993 TAG: 9302180017
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: MADELYN ROSENBERG STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A POET AND MORE
She has danced in Tel Aviv. Acted on and off Broadway. Taught. Composed songs. Sung them.And oh, yes, she has written.
Poems, plays, autobiographies about courage and dignity in Southern black communities.
Many people have known Maya Angelou, born in 1928 in St. Louis. They've read books such as "Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Die," which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. They've seen her on television.
Today, the nation knows her for reading a poem she had composed for President Clinton's inauguration, her rich, melodic, regal voice echoing through the capital. Angelou was the first poet in 16 years commissioned to write a poem for a new president.
The people who booked her to speak at Virginia Tech next week are acting like they knew all along that she would be a hot ticket.
"It was all part of the plan," Jack Dudley, head of the honors program, has been rumored to say.
Truth is, Tech signed the contract to bring in Angelou last July, before she had received the word from Clinton and the spotlight, said Julie Sina, assistant dean of students.
Truth is, Tech had to move the performance from Colonial Hall in Squires to the university's largest auditorium in Burruss Hall.
Tech had been using her book, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, in a "common reading experience" for freshman. It was a pilot program, designed to get students talking and adjusted to college life.
They read the book last summer, before they came to Tech, and 600 freshmen and honors students discussed it this fall.
"We'd wanted a book where there was some possibility of bringing the author here," Sina said. And Tech wanted, too, for the students to read something with a theme that would match the theme of diversity during orientation - something that would cross the cultures.
The author is hailed as one of the great voices of contemporary black literature.
Angelou, who lives in Winston-Salem, N.C., and teaches at Wake Forest University, still has ties to this valley.
She was a visiting professor at Radford University during the 1989-1990 school year. Her portrait hangs in the president's office there.
The theme in her work, "I am a human being: Nothing human is alien to me," was the theme in her classes, too, said Joyce Graham, who assisted Angelou and wrote a dissertation on the poet when the two were at Radford.
Graham sat in on those courses on Mondays, the days that Angelou commuted from North Carolina to the Radford campus.
"She has a phenomenal memory," Graham said. "She was always quoting different authors and different works."
But never her own. In fact, Angelou never even alluded to her works during those classes, though one of them was a course in black American literature. She left those references to other teachers.
Angelou sang in class a few times, Graham said, and her performances invariably begin with something poetic: a song, a dance. Because Angelou is a performer, as well as a scholar and teacher.
At Radford, professors who had known Angelou were buzzing about her performance for the president.
"Everyone was saying, `Oh, I have to see her.' "
Graham, now a professor at Radford, was teaching a class of her own during the inauguration and had to tape it.
"When she's in a room - I don't know if it's because of her reputation or personality, they are so intertwined - she's the center of what's going on," Graham said. "As well she should be. She has a great deal to offer."
NOTE: also ran in Extra section February 20, 1993.