The Grace to Mourn
Maya
Angelou
The acclaimed American poet,
storyteller, activist, and autobiographer, has died at the age of 86, May 28, 2014, in Winston-Salem, NC.
Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson
in St. Louis, Missouri, April 4th, 1928. Angelou has had a varied
career as a singer, dancer, actress, composer, and, interestingly enough, as Hollywood's first female
black director, but is most famous as a writer, playwright, and poet.
Angelou’s most famous work, I Know Why
the Caged Bird Sings (1969), deals with her early years in Long Beach,
St. Louis and Stamps, Arkansas, where she lived with her paternal grandmother.
In this memoir, Angelou bravely describes how she was first cuddled
then molested by her mother's boyfriend when she was just seven years old. When
the man was murdered by her uncles for this crime, Angelou felt responsible,
and stopped talking. She remained mute for five years, but during this quiet
time, she developed a love for great literature by black authors as well as world classics. When Angelou was twelve and a
half years old, her teacher, Mrs. Flowers, finally got her to speak again. Mrs.
Flowers, as Angelou recalled in her children’s book Mrs. Flowers: A
Moment of Friendship (1986), emphasized the importance of
the spoken word, taught the importance of education, and instilled in her a
love of poetry. Angelou graduated at the top of her eighth-grade class.
During the early 1990s, Angelou wrote other
books for children, including Life Doesn't Frighten Me (1993),
which also featured the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, My Painted House, My
Friendly Chicken, and Me (1994), and Kofi and His Magic (1996),
both collaborations with the photographer Margaret Courtney-Clark.
from Caged Bird
BY
MAYA ANGELOU
A free
bird leaps
on the
back of the wind
and
floats downstream
till
the current ends
and
dips his wing
in the
orange sun rays
and
dares to claim the sky.
But a
bird that stalks
down
his narrow cage
can
seldom see through
his
bars of rage
his
wings are clipped and
his
feet are tied
so he
opens his throat to sing.
The
caged bird sings
with a
fearful trill
of
things unknown
but
longed for still
and his
tune is heard
on the
distant hill
for the
caged bird
sings
of freedom.
“Caged Bird” from Shaker,
Why Don't You Sing? Copyright © 1983 by Maya Angelou. Published by Random
House, Inc.
source: The Poetry
Foundation
I speak to the Black experience, but I am
always talking about the human condition — about what we can endure, dream,
fail at and survive.
Morning
Grace
If
today I follow death,
go
down its trackless wastes,
salt
my tongue on hardened tears
for
my precious dear time’s waste
race
along
that promised cave in a headlong
deadlong
haste,
Will
you
have
the
grace
to
mourn for
me?
from Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou,
1994, Random House, Inc.
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Farley Mowat
Iconic Canadian author,
environmentalist and activist Farley Mowat has died at age 92 on May 6 2014 in
Port Hope, Ontario.
Farley Mowat was born
in Belleville, Ontario, in 1921, the son of a librarian, and grew up in
Belleville, Richmond Hill, Trenton, Windsor, Saskatoon and Toronto. At the age
of 13 the budding environmentalist founded a newsletter, Nature Lore, and wrote
a weekly column on birds for the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix.
He served in the
Second World War from 1940 to 1945, taking part in the invasion of Sicily and
later mainland Italy before working as an intelligence officer in the
Netherlands in 1945.
Through his writing
about nature and animals, he became an ardent environmentalist.
For the last 25 years
he’s been the international chair of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
His
best-known book is Never Cry Wolf, 1963. One of his admirers said, “NEVER CRY WOLF has
been attacked as being more fable than fact, and this may be true. Mowat has
often said that he prefers not to let facts get in the way of the truth, and
there is no question that he wanted his readers to come to love these generally
benighted creatures.”
and written especially for children:
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| 1961 |
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| 1957 |
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John Rowe Townsend
The English novelist, critic, and academician, John Rowe Townsend passed away Monday March 24, 2014 at the age of 91. He was the winner of the 1970 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for his novel The Intruder.
With his wife, Jill Paton Walsh, he was instrumental in the early years of Simmons College's Center for the Study of Children's Literature, and, later, the founding of Children's Literature New England (a nonprofit educational organization that promotes awareness of the significance of literature in the lives of children).
He was born on May 22, 1922 in Leeds, United Kingdom.
--based on a tribute by Roger Sutton, Horn Book magazine
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Phyllis Krasilovsky
Phyllis Krasilovsky, an author of books for young children illustrated by artists including Barbara Cooney, Trina Schart Hyman, and Peter Spier, died on February 26 in Redding, Connecticut at the age of 87. The cause of death was complications from a stroke, as reported in the New York Times.
Born Phyllis Manning in Brooklyn on August 28, 1926 to Richard and Florence Manning, Krasilovsky attended James Madison High School and Brooklyn College.
One of her most popular titles, The Cow Who Fell in the Canal (Doubleday, 1957) almost wasn’t published,according to Peter Spier, who illustrated the book. Spier described meeting with Peggy Lesser, then an editor at Doubleday, to discuss Spier’s first picture book. On Lesser’s desk was a manuscript entitled Anarina, the Dutch Cow, by Krasilovsky, which the editor had already rejected. Spier, who was Dutch, persuaded Lesser to let him take a look at the manuscript. He renamed the cow “Hendrika,” gave the book its current title, and set the story in Broek, Holland, incorporating many familiar names and places from his childhood. After publication, the book was translated into many languages and is still very popular in the Netherlands, according to Spier.
from School Library Journal by Rocco Staino
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| 1986, by Pat Diska |
Erik Blegvad
Erik Blegvad, a prolific children’s book artist renowned for illustrations whose fine-grained propriety could barely conceal the deep subversive wit at their core, died on Jan. 14 in London. He was 90.
Erik Blegvad was born in Copenhagen on March 3, 1923. As a youth, planning a career as an airplane mechanic, he apprenticed in a machine shop. He left the shop after the German occupation of Denmark in 1940, when it began doing work for the Nazis.
Mr. Blegvad, who had always liked to draw, entered the Copenhagen School of Arts and Crafts. Though he described himself as having been a poor student there, he was allowed to graduate — a function, he later said, of his having spent several days in a Nazi prison for distributing Danish resistance literature.
“There was a rumor that the only reason I graduated was because I had been arrested by the Gestapo and that the school did not want to see somebody who had been arrested also fail his exams,” Mr. Blegvad said in an interview quoted in the reference work Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults.
After Germany’s defeat, Mr. Blegvad served in what is now the Royal Danish Air Force, later assisting the British as a German-to-English translator in occupied Germany. Afterward, working as a commercial illustrator in Paris, he met Lenore Hochman, an American art student there; they were married from 1950 until her death in 2008.
Mr. Blegvad, who moved with his wife to the United States in 1951 and contributed illustrations to American magazines, maintained a home in Wardsboro, Vt., for many years.
from Erik Blegvad's obituary in The New York Times by Margalit Fox
“This Little Pig-a-Wig and Other Rhymes About Pigs” (1978), which, with text chosen by Lenore Blegvad, was named one of the best illustrated children’s books of the year by The New York Times Book Review.
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