Lisa Page is the acting director of the creative writing department.

Over her 86-year lifespan, Maya Angelou did much more than put pen to paper.

She was an activist who rallied for civil rights, refusing to celebrate her own birthday because it was the day her friend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. She was a rape survivor whose mother’s boyfriend attacked her when she was only eight years old. She was a single mother who gave birth to her only son while still a teenager.

And she was a working woman, finding employment as a fry cook, streetcar conductor, shake dancer, pimp, calypso singer, journalist, thespian, director and film producer, to name just a few of her various occupations.

Her iconic memoir, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” was published in 1969. The book was groundbreaking because of its subject matter: A young black girl comes of age in the era of segregation and finds her voice – literally – after a traumatic attack. She then goes on to have a successful career, working as a journalist in Egypt and Ghana at a time when few American women even dreamed of such a thing.

The book was illuminating because of her voice. Angelou was candid, even blunt, about racism, violence, the Midwest, the Deep South, the Middle East and men and women.

“I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass – the slave narrative – speaking in the first person singular, talking about the first person plural, always saying ‘I’ and meaning ‘we.’ And what a responsibility,” she told the Paris Review in 1990.

That single observation explains so much about who she was.

Angelou was telling her own story. Yet she was always aware of the collective experience – even as she delivered an original voice. Yes, she was an important writer. And she was so much more.