Maya Angelou was an American poet, memoirist and civil-rights activist. Born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, she grew up in Stamps, Arkansas, and went on to write seven autobiographies, beginning with the landmark I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Random House, 1969), alongside her poetry. She worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and read her poem On the Pulse of Morning at Bill Clinton’s presidential inauguration in 1993.
Publication: “Still I Rise” gives its name to Angelou’s third poetry collection, And Still I Rise (Random House, 1978). It has since been reprinted in The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (Random House, 1994). In the UK, And Still I Rise was published by Virago Press (1986), and the anthology reproduces the poem by permission of Little, Brown Book Group as well as Random House.
Context: The poem grew out of Angelou’s engagement with the Civil Rights movement and her witness to the long aftermath of slavery and segregation in the American South. The speaker’s rising is at once personal (one woman’s self-respect) and historical (the rising of an entire community from the legacy of slavery). The poem became an anthem of the late twentieth century.