SOURCE: “Women Writers Talking,” edited by Janet Todd, Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1983, pp. 59–67.

In the following interview, originally conducted in 1981, Angelou talks about her writing habits and the values by which she is guided, and those which she wishes to pass on.

In 1969 Maya Angelou published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a memoir of her girlhood in Stamps, Arkansas, and San Francisco, California. The book quickly became a contemporary classic. More fully than any writer before her, Angelou laid bare the pain of the black girl's coming of age. She counted the costs of being doubly disenfranchised in a society that denied black women's beauty and worth. Yet interlaced with the sadness was joy, conveyed in the spiritual peace and power of her grandmother and in the élan with which her mother lived her life. Ultimately, Caged Bird is a song of triumph: the young Maya's triumph...