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Maya
Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928.
She grew up in St. Louis and Stamps, Arkansas. She is an author, poet,
historian, songwriter, playwright, dancer, stage and screen engenderer,
director, performer, singer, and civil rights activist. She is prominent for
her autobiographical books: All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), The
Heart of a Woman (1981), Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
(1976), Gather Together in My Name (1974), and I Ken Why the Caged Bird Sings
(1969), which was nominated for the National Book Award. Among her volumes of
poetry are A Brave and Startling Truth (Random House, 1995), The Complete
Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (1994), Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey
Now (1993), Now Sheba Sings the Musical composition (1987), I Shall Not Be
Moved (1990), Shaker, Why Don't You Sing? (1983), Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna
Fit Me Well (1975), and Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie
(1971), which was nominated for the Pulitzer prize.
In
1959, at the request of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Maya Angelou became the
northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. From
1961 to 1962 she was associate editor of The Arab Observer in Cairo, Egypt, the
only English-language news weekly in the Middle East, and from 1964 to 1966 she
was feature editor of the African Review in Accra, Ghana. She returned to the
U.S. in 1974 and was appointed by Gerald Ford to the Bicentennial Commission
and later by Jimmy Carter to the Commission for International Woman of the
Year. She accepted a lifetime appointment in 1981 as Reynolds Professor of
American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In
1993, Angelou indited and distributed a poem, "On The Pulse of the Morning,"
at the inauguration for President Bill Clinton at his request.
The
first black woman director in Hollywood, Angelou has indited, engendered,
directed, and starred in engenderments for stage, film, and television. In
1971, she indited the pristine screenplay and musical score for the film
Georgia, Georgia, and was both author and executive engenderer of a five-part
television miniseries "Three Way Choice." She has withal indited and
engendered several prize-winning documentaries, including "Afro-Americans
in the Arts," a PBS special for which she received the Golden Eagle Award.
Maya Angelou was twice nominated for a Tony award for acting: once for her
Broadway debut in Look Away (1973), and again for her performance in Roots
(1977).
Biography from: Poets.org
2. Amy
Lowell
Amy Lowell (1874-1925), American Imagist poet, was a woman of great accomplishment. She was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, to a prominent family of high-achievers. Her environment was literary and sophisticated, and when she left private school at 17 to care for her elderly parents, she embarked on a program of self-education.
Her poetic career began in 1902 when she saw Eleonora Duse, a famous actress, perform on stage. Overcome with Eleonora's beauty and talent, she wrote her first poem addressed to the actress. They met only a couple times and never developed a relationship, but Eleonora inspired many poems from Amy and triggered her career.
Ada Russell, another actress, became the love of Amy's life. She met Ada in 1909 and they remained together until Amy's death in 1925. Amy wrote many, many poems about Ada. In the beginning, as with her previous poems about women, she wrote in such a way that only those who knew the inspiration for a poem would recognize its lesbian content. But as time went on, she censored her work less and less. By the time she wrote Pictures of the Floating World, her poems about Ada were much more blatantly erotic. The series "Planes of Personality: Two Speak Together" chronicles their relationship, including the intensely erotic poem "A Decade" that celebrates their tenth anniversary.
Amy's dedication to the art of poetry was consuming. She purchased her parent's estate upon her death and established it as a center of poetry, as well as a place to breed her beloved English sheepdogs. She promoted American poetry, acting as a patron to a number of poets. Amy also wrote many essays, translated the works of others, and wrote literary biographies. Her two-volume biography of Keats was well-received in the United States, though it was rejected in England as presumptuous.
She is best known for bringing the Imagist movement to America. Her own work, full of lush imagery but slim on excess verbiage, was similar to that of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), an emerging Imagist poet in England. . When Amy saw the similarity, she travelled to England to research the movement and ended up bringing back volumes of poetry to introduce Imagist work to the United States. Ezra Pound, the "head" of the movement, was most offended by Amy's involvement. He threatened to sue her, something which delighted her no end, and finally he removed himself from the movement entirely. She argued that this was good; he would ruin it anyway. Pound took to calling the movement "Amygisme," and engaged in plenty of scathing attacks against her.
Beyond the nasty slurs hurled by Pound, Amy was criticized for many more things that did not actually reflect her skill as a poet. Critics were offended by her lesbianism, by the way she wore men's shirts and smoked cigars, and even by her obesity. They argued that she must not have experienced true passion, reflecting a common prejudice that women who are overweight cannot possibly be sexual beings. In the face of these barbs, her literary career suffered, and she did not achieve the status as a poet she so richly deserved.
Her admirers defended her, however, even after her death. One of the best rebuttals was written by Heywood Broun , in his obituary tribute to Amy. He wrote, "She was upon the surface of things a Lowell, a New Englander and a spinster. But inside everything was molten like the core of the earth... Given one more gram of emotion, Amy Lowell would have burst into flame and been consumed to cinders."
Amy's book, What's O'Clock, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1926, a year after her death.
(sources: http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/amy_lowell/biography )
3. Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a family well known for educational and political activity. Her father, an orthodox Calvinist, was a lawyer and treasurer of the local college. He also served in Congress. Dickinson's mother, whose name was also Emily, was a cold, religious, hard-working housewife, who suffered from depression. Her relationship with her daughter was distant. Later Dickinson wrote in a letter, that she never had a mother.
Dickinson was educated at Amherst Academy (1834-47) and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (1847-48). Around 1850 she started to compose poems - "Awake ye muses nine, sing me a strain divine, / Unwind the solemn twine, and tie my Valentine!" she said in her earliest known poem, dated March 4, 1850. It was published in Springfield Daily Republican in 1852.
The style of her first efforts was fairly conventional, but after years of practice she began to give room for experiments. Often written in the metre of hymns, her poems dealt not only with issues of death, faith and immortality, but with nature, domesticity, and the power and limits of language. From c.1858 Dickinson assembled many of her poems in packets of 'fascicles', which she bound herself with needle and thread. A selection of these poems appeared in 1890.
In 1862 Dickinson started her life long correspondence and friendship with Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911), a writer and reformer, who commanded during the Civil War the first troop of African-American soldiers. Higginson later published Army Life in a Black Regiment in 1870. On of the four poems he received from Dickinson was the famous 'Safe in their Alabaster Chambers.'
Biography from: ReadPrint.com
4, Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Shirley Geok-Lin Lim is a Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1973, and has also taught at internationally, at the National University of Singapore, NIE of Nanyang Technological University, and most recently as Chair Professor at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include Asian-American and post-colonial cultural productions and ethnic and feminist writing. She is the author of five books of poems; three books of short stories; two books of criticism: Nationalism and Literature (1993) and Writing South/East Asia in English: Against the Grain (1994); a book of memoirs, Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands (1996), and a novel, Joss and Gold (2001). She has served as editor/co-editor of numerous scholarly works, including The Forbidden Stitch (1989), Approaches to Teaching Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1991), and Transnational Asia Pacific (1999). Professor Lim is currently at work on a study of gender and nation in Asian American representations.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim (Fulbright and Wien International Scholar; Ph.D. Brandeis University) is an Asian American/ Malaysian-Singapore writer of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and criticism. Her first collection of poems,Crossing The Peninsula, published in 1980, won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, a first both for an Asian and a woman. She's published seven poetry collections; three books of short stories; two novels (Joss and Gold andSister Swing); a children's novel, Princess Shawl, translated into Chinese; and The Shirley Lim Collection. Her memoir, Among the White Moon Faces, received the American Book Award. Author of two critical studies, she edited/co-edited Reading the Literatures of Asian America; Approaches to Kingston's The Woman Warrior;Transnational Asia Pacific; Power, Race and Gender in Academe; Transnational Asian American Literature; The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women's Anthology (1990 American Book Award winner); Writing Singapore; and other volumes; edited/co-edited Journal of Transnational American Studies and other journals. She served as Women's Studies Chair (UCSB) and Chair Professor of English (HKU) and is Research Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara. Awarded the Multiethnic Literatures of the United States Lifetime Achievement Award and UCSB Faculty Research Lecture Award, she has taught at CUNY, SUNY, MIT, National Institute of Education (NTU), National Sun Yat-Sen University, National University of Singapore, and City University of Hong Kong.
(sources : http://lim.english.ucsb.edu/bio.php )
5. Ros Barber
Ros Barber (born 1964)
is a British poet and writer.
Barber was born in
Washington D.C., where her father was working for the US government, and grew up in Essex, later
moving to Sussex to study for a
Biology degree. Both parents are physicists by training, and Barber has a strong interest in science and
mathematics which comes through in the
formal aspects of many of her poems.
Her first full
collection of poetry, How Things Are On Thursday (Anvil, 2004) came after seventeen years of
appearing frequently in anthologies,
poetry magazines and prize shortlists. Not the Usual Grasses Singing (Four Shores, 2005), the
result of a public art commission,
is a book about the Isle of Sheppey written entirely in rhyming couplets. Her next book from
Anvil, Material, is due to be
published in early 2008. She also writes fiction.
Many of Barber's
personal poems are concerned with the constrained expression of high
emotion; she works frequently in form (both rhyme and metre), and conveys human difficulties with
honesty,
directness, and a wry, dark humour. She is well known in the
South of England for her public poetry commissions, which are largely
site-specific or place based, connecting landscapes or urban environments to their histories.
Writing in a richly
imagistic but accessible style, and adept and transferring both her voice and the voices of
others to the page, Barber is also a striking performer of her own work.
(sources : http://rosbarber.com/about/ )
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