Women Writers' Day · October
Maya Angelou
A Woman Who Kept Rising
poet · writer · activist (1928–2014)
Read the text. Then click the right answer for each gap — the text fills in as you go!
Maya Angelou, whose real name was Marguerite Annie Johnson, (1) ______ born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1928. When she was three, her parents (2) ______, so she and her older brother were sent to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. Life in the South was hard for Black families, who faced racism and (3) ______ every day.
When Maya was a little girl, something terrible happened to her, and she stopped (4) ______ for almost five years. During that silent time, she taught (5) ______ to love words by reading every book she could find. A kind neighbour, Mrs Flowers, (6) ______ her to read poetry aloud, and slowly Maya found her voice again.
Her teenage years were not easy either. By the age of seventeen, she (7) ______ a mother. To support her son, she took many different jobs. In fact, she was the first Black woman (8) ______ worked as a streetcar conductor in San Francisco. Later, she worked as a dancer, singer, journalist and teacher, and lived in Egypt and Ghana. She was an incredibly (9) ______ woman.
In the 1960s, she fought for civil (10) ______ together with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. When her famous autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, came out in 1969, King (11) ______ only a year before. Many readers saw (12) ______ in her story, and the book became a bestseller.
In 1978 she published the poem "And Still I Rise". In it, the speaker talks directly to the people who have tried to hurt her, but she describes (13) ______ as proud, strong and full of hope. Like the woman in the poem, Maya never gave (14) ______, no matter how many times life pushed her down.
She died in 2014, but she is still remembered as one of the (15) ______ important voices in American literature.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario