Angelou, a writer, poet, actress and activist, is one of America's most prominent and influential African-American women.

Angelou's brutal childhood is familiar to most American high school students. In the oft-required reading autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), she describes shuttling between her grandmother's home in segregated Arkansas and her mother's house in San Francisco. At seven she was raped by her mother's boyfriend, who was consequently beaten to death by Angelou's uncles—and she became mute for five years as a result. As an adult she was a cabaret singer, a prostitute, a cook, and the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco, before becoming involved in the civil rights movement of the '60s and later achieving international acclaim as a poet and memoirist.

Over Angelou's 40-year plus career, she's published a dozen bestselling books and volumes of poetry, earned nominations for two Tonys, three Grammys, and a Pulitzer, taught students all over the world, and inspired countless writers, poets and artists. (She inspires presidents, too: She wrote and delivered a poem, "On The Pulse of the Morning," at the inauguration for President Bill Clinton at his request.) These days she commutes between New York and North Carolina, where she's the Reynolds professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University. You don't have to travel that far to take in her wise words: in 2010 she donated her personal papers to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem [Image via Getty]