New Look Maya Angelou

Coming November 2023

This November we are reissuing our complete collection of Maya Angelou’s seven volume set of autobiographical writing. This set of books take us through her extraordinary life, from the American south of the 1930s to 1964 and the precipice of change where we find Maya working alongside her friends Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. The collection is a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty: as a Black woman she has known discrimination and extreme poverty, but also hope, joy, achievement and celebration.

‘A brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman’ – President Barack Obama

To celebrate her birthday – 4 April 1928 – we are giving you a first look at four of the covers!

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

Arguably the most famous of the seven volume set, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings beautifully evokes Maya Angelou’s childhood with her grandmother in the American south of the 1930s. She learns the power of the white folks at the other end of town and suffers the terrible trauma of rape by her mother’s lover.

The Heart of a Woman

The Heart of a Woman is the fourth volume of Angelou’s enthralling autobiography. In this volume we find her immersed in the world of black writers and artists in Harlem, working in the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King.

A Song Flung Up to Heaven

It is 1964 and Maya Angelou is on her way back home, leaving behind her beloved – and now seriously teenage – son Guy, to finish university in Ghana. America is pulsing with the challenge of change, the civil rights movement is in full swing and that’s where Maya Angelou wants to be, working alongside her friends Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.

In this marvellous account, Maya Angelou provides, with her customary wisdom, compassion and wit, a first-hand record of an extraordinarily exciting and tragic political period. She writes of ‘Jimmy’ Baldwin, Eldridge Cleaver, and of friends and family, and finishes with the beginnings of her career as one of America’s most impressive memoir writers.

Mom and Me and Mom

In Mom & Me & Mom, Angelou details what brought her mother to send her away and unearths the well of emotions Angelou experienced long afterward as a result. While Angelou’s six autobiographies tell of her out in the world, influencing and learning from statesmen and cultural icons, Mom & Me & Mom shares the intimate, emotional story about her own family.

We will also be reissuing:

Gather Together In My Name

Singin’ & Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas

All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes

Covers to come.