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For Maya

May 29, 2014
Blog

Fifteen years ago, ESSENCE Magazine took me to Winston-Salem, North Carolina to sit with Maya Angelou in her lovely, spacious home for a fly-on-the-wall exchange between Maya and me about Black women "embracing their own power." A discussion between a poet and a politician can get deep when the poet is Maya Angelou. "A powerful sense of self involves humility, but never modesty," Maya said. Of Maya, I said, "the difference between Maya and me is that though she may not speak for people in some formal sense, my God, she speaks to them and they listen!" Today, as I face her passing, I also think about that conversation with one of the world's great self-made women.

Published: May 29, 2014