Maya Angelou

Renowned poet, activist and teacher Maya Angelou explores the importance and the impact of faith in people's lives in the new PBS special "Maya Angelou: Rainbow in the Clouds," airing Friday. The one-hour documentary follows Angelou's visit inside San Francisco's rough Tenderloin district, where she goes inside Glide Memorial Church, which has an ethnically and economically diverse Methodist congregation. She also briefly attends Mount Zion Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, N.C.

Highlighting the importance of the African American vote in the May 21 mayoral runoff, Wendy Greuel and Eric Garcetti held dueling news conferences in South Los Angeles on Thursday to tout new endorsements from highly sought black leaders. At various points, some of the participants even got a little testy. Basketball legend Magic Johnson backed Greuel, saying that he selected the city controller because of her broad range of experience in the public and private sectors, her longtime ties to the African American community and the historic nature of her candidacy to be the city's first female mayor.

On Inauguration Day to herald his presidency, Bill Clinton has chosen a fellow Arkansan to recite a dedicatory poem created for this august occasion. The poet shares Clinton's humble beginnings, his small-town roots and his enduring passion for the written word. Maya Angelou personifies the phoenix-like rise that this young, President is promising a divided nation. She retreated into silence after being raped as a child.

City Councilwoman Jan Perry endorsed Eric Garcetti to be Los Angeles' next mayor on Thursday, saying her support was prompted by two factors - Garcetti's track record in his city council district and sending a message to the special interests that poured millions of dollars into supporting City Controller Wendy Greuel in the mayoral primary. “It would have been easy for me to sit on the sidelines and let the chips fall where they may,” after coming in fourth in the primary, Perry said.

Celebrity autobiographies? Ugh! Too many are self-aggrandizements and/or flushed-out elaborations of scanty press packets. Titillation and allusion shape the redundant seduction of the reader already seduced by fame. Confessions and pseudo-confessions are often embarrassingly hollow and juiceless. Rare are the weighty sojourns into soul/self or the rich evocations of an era. Too often sanitizing the past for public consumption is meticulously done to the point of tedium.

IF Maya Angelou likes you, even just a bit, she wants to cook for you. The 76-year-old celebrated writer and poet invests something personal in each dish, whether for the hungry stranger walking into the San Francisco joint where she slung Creole hash as a 17-year-old or for the famous friends to whom she still serves smothered chicken and spoon bread. It's a quality she learned early at her grandmother's table.

Tremors of your network cause kings to disappear. Your open mouth in anger makes nations bow in fear. Your bombs can change the seasons, obliterate the spring. What more do you long for? Why are you suffering? You control the human lives in Rome and Timbuktu. Lonely nomads wandering owe Telstar to you. Seas shift at your bidding, Your mushrooms fill the sky. Why are you unhappy? Why do your children cry? They kneel alone in terror with dread in every glance.

Maybe inaugurations get the poets they deserve. Four years ago, Maya Angelou stirred people's hearts with "On the Pulse of Morning." The rock of the past, she said, gives us neither haven nor hiding place in its shadow, but we can gain strength from its weight to face our destiny. We need, she said, to live beyond the "bloody sear" of cynicism. She urged us to face our history with courage. Angelou's message of hope seemed to fit.

The world knows Maya Angelou as President Clinton's favorite poet and the award-winning author of the autobiographical novel "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings." But Scamp Records wants us to know her as the calypso singer whose 1957 album, "Miss Calypso," was reissued this week by the tiny, New York-based label. It's tempting, after seeing the album cover, to dismiss the collection as a spoof--maybe something from Spy magazine.

Showing talents in comedy as well as verse, Maya Angelou celebrated African-American poetry before an audience of about 2,000 at Pepperdine University Wednesday night. During her 90-minute performance, attended by a multiethnic assembly of students, alumni and fans from all over Southern California, Angelou recited her work and that of others. She encouraged the audience "to make this country more than it is today." She urged students to ask librarians for the poetry of African-Americans.

President Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Tuesday to former President George H.W. Bush and 14 others, including poet Maya Angelou, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, investor Warren Buffett and basketball legend Bill Russell. The medal is the nation's highest civilian honor and is awarded to individuals who have made significant contributions "to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.

President Obama will honor a baseball hall of famer, the German head of state, a billionaire philanthropist and one of his predecessors with the nation's highest civilian honor, the White House announced Wednesday. In total, 15 individuals have been chosen to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to those who "have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.

Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr., director of Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research (among much else), has made a sequel to his 2006 PBS series "African American Lives" -- "African American Lives 2," this one is called -- in which he traces the ancestry of famous black people as far back as the written record allows, and then a little farther, thanks to the scientific magic of DNA analysis.

A night with Maya Angelou includes a little singing, a little poetry, a little storytelling. And why shouldn't it? She is an actor, a poet, an author and, despite protestations to the contrary Friday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, a mesmerizing singer.

"Amazing Peace," a poem Maya Angelou wrote and read for last week's Christmas tree lighting at the White House, was published Tuesday in a stand-alone edition by Random House. The publisher said that the 32-page book has a suggested retail price of $9.95 and a first printing of 230,000. Angelou is the author of the classic memoir "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" and a poet whose "On the Pulse of the Morning," written for President Clinton's first inauguration, was a million-seller.

IF Maya Angelou likes you, even just a bit, she wants to cook for you. The 76-year-old celebrated writer and poet invests something personal in each dish, whether for the hungry stranger walking into the San Francisco joint where she slung Creole hash as a 17-year-old or for the famous friends to whom she still serves smothered chicken and spoon bread. It's a quality she learned early at her grandmother's table.

A night with Maya Angelou includes a little singing, a little poetry, a little storytelling. And why shouldn't it? She is an actor, a poet, an author and, despite protestations to the contrary Friday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, a mesmerizing singer.

Maya Angelou is singing. A jazz band plays not 30 feet from her table, a pretty good band, too. Good enough to fill this Santa Monica hotel lounge and keep the customers coming. Few of them notice the older woman sitting in the rear with her back to the stage, swaying in her seat, singing. Angelou is sheathed regally this evening in a purple velvet dress with matching purple shawl, her neck and wrists bedecked with gold.

A group of employees at Los Angeles' Museum of Tolerance packs into a conference room, watching Maya Angelou and Billy Crystal on "Oprah." "Why do we need to know where we came from?" the talk-show host asks. Crystal gamely plunges in. "It places me ... it gives me a center," the comic and sometime Oscar host suggests, ceding the floor to Angelou. "In this fast-food world, everyone feels like he or she is a blade of grass," the author intones in her mellifluous contralto. "In fact, we're trees.

On the cobblestone riverfront where the first slaves arrived in Georgia, the city unveiled a bronze and granite monument to black Americans on Saturday, ending a decade of delays and debate. The monument, depicting a black family embracing with broken chains at its feet, is the first to honor blacks in a city that has erected statues of its white founders and Civil War heroes for nearly two centuries. "I'm glad we got it up.