The story about Maya Angelou and writing Maya’s Song is that Brian Collier, the illustrator, came to me and said, I am under contract and I’m illustrating a book about Maya Angelo. He was going to write it. And then he thought, why am I writing this? I should get a poet. I should get a writer to write this. I want us to create something together. And I was like, okay, let’s make it happen. And so many years later, we have Maya song and it just so happened she’s one of my favorite poets. I felt like I needed to fact check, but I didn’t have to really research because I knew so much about her already. I grew up on her poetry, heard her speak several times, had seen the documentary several times.
So it was an easy yes, and I knew that I to honor the poet by writing poetry about her life. And also I feel like these big stories that span decades, it’s hard sometimes I think for a young person to take in that big story. And so bite size pieces, like poetry verse vignettes, can help a child just kind of take the story moment by moment and not feel so overwhelmed by this big life. And I think educators can also, we’re just going to read these three and stop here and talk about this can be a little easier to navigate. But I mean, the real reason is because she’s a poet and I wanted to write in the form that she is known mostly for. But then I was also thinking of how can the poems hold all of the emotion and be kind of a container for that, for those emotions?
Because her childhood was traumatic. She had sexual abuse that happened, and I knew that I was not going to sanitize her story, so I needed to think about how to best tell it. And poetry softens the telling. It also creates a container for those emotions that are sometimes uneasy and heavy to feel. So I felt like poetry would be the best way to go for Maya song. And again, I just was so honored to have Brian ask me to be a part of this. I love his work. I love collage. And so what he did with the illustrations I thought was bringing my words to life in a way that I could not have imagined.