Maya Angelou's House: Valley Rd. Winston-Salem [Photo album]

Winston-Salem, NC: [No publisher], 1980. Very Good. Photo album containing candid snapshots of Maya Angelou and her friends and associates. Fifty-seven photos, of which 23 are in color and 34 in black and white, under glassine on sticky album pages. Bound in padded red and gold paper-covered boards, handlettered label sticker to spine, internal spiral binding. Very Good with rubbed lower edges, fading to spine, and split to paper at lower rear joint. Pages toned, adhesive coating weak; most pictures have shifted around and are loose behind the glassine. Most of the photos were taken at the same event at Angelou's house during the 1980s, though several near-duplicates depict Eugene B. Redmond and Ruth Love standing in front of an art installation. One street scene portrait of Redmond is inscribed on the back: "To Ruth - Best, Imani. Street scene, New York, Fall '85." Maya Angelou moved to the North Carolinian city of Winston-Salem after accepting a lifetime professorship at Wake Forest University in 1981, which she held until her death in 2014. Angelou, who appears in eleven of these photos, found the experience transformative. She once told a USA Today reporter that “I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes. But I had to work at Wake Forest to know that.” Among Angelou's many guests was the poet and professor Eugene B. Redmond, a longtime close friend who appears twenty-four times in this album and who stamped many of the photos on verso with “Compliments Poet-Eugene B. Redmond.” The educator Ruth Love appears in forty of the photographs. As the Superintendent of the Oakland School system in the late 1970s, she created programming to bring prominent African Americans, including Maya Angelou, face to face with students in order to inspire and educate them. The two women maintained their friendship and traveled to Ghana together in 1993. An intimate look into the personal life of one of the greatest figures of American writing, touching in its ordinariness. (Inventory #: 140947542)