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Maya Angelou was the voice of three generations. Her poetry spanned our journey, chronicled our hearts and documented our struggles as we moved from the orations of Martin Luther King to the presidency of Barack Obama.

Some critics will write 'Maya Angelou is a natural writer' - which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.

Thank you so much for supporting me from the day I stepped foot into the music industry. It really means something to me to have Maya Angelou speak on my behalf. It also means a lot to have Oprah on my speed dial!

I am an English major in school with an emphasis in creative writing. I think hearing Maya Angelou speak at school last year was one of the best moments Stanford, at least, intellectually, had to offer.

Anyone reading contemporary poetry - especially contemporary African-American poetry - will quickly see that race is an enduring subject. What some don't realize is just how diverse the handling of that subject is. It's as diverse as blackness.

Most of the more celebrated names among African-American authors, poets, and artists are known to the world because of their association with specific cultural arts movements.

Oprah Winfrey represents the most ingenious and creative expression of black spiritual genius in the public mainstream that we've had in quite a long time, if ever.

Aretha Franklin was as important to the civil-rights movement as Malcolm X and Medgar Evers. Artists can choose to take on the tremendous amount of responsibility we have, or choose to ignore it.

Of course, there are those critics - New York critics as a rule - who say, 'Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it's good but then she's a natural writer.' Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

Angela Davis's legacy as a freedom fighter made her an enemy of the state under the increasingly neoliberal regimes of Nixon, Reagan and J. Edgar Hoover because she understood that the struggle for freedom was not only a struggle for political and individual rights but also for economic rights.