Celebrate! Maya

Since Maya Angelou died in 2014, her memory and legacy have been carried forth by fans and fellow writers. The Celebrate! Maya Project seeks to preserve Angelou's legacy and spread her message into Arkansas schools and communities.
Since Maya Angelou died in 2014, her memory and legacy have been carried forth by fans and fellow writers. The Celebrate! Maya Project seeks to preserve Angelou's legacy and spread her message into Arkansas schools and communities.

Since Maya Angelou died in 2014, her memory and legacy have been carried forth by countless fans and fellow writers who seek to honor a legendary author and activist who, for a time, called Stamps, Arkansas, home.

Stamps was where Angelou lived for several of her childhood years, living with her paternal grandmother, who ran a general store in town. Stamps is where she fell under the spell of Shakespeare and nurtured a love for writing.

Author of groundbreaking autobiographies like "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" and books of poetry, Angelou has even been celebrated since her passing with a Maya Angelou Forever Stamp. Upon it reads one of her most famous lines: "A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."

The Celebrate! Maya Project has sought to both preserve Angelou's legacy and also spread Angelou's message into Arkansas schools and communities.

Celebrate! Maya Project has organized a special three-day event next weekend as a 5th anniversary celebration with a FriendRaiser of wine, hors d'oeuvres, poetry and live music on Thursday at Trapnall Hall in Little Rock; a 5th Anniversary Celebration reception gala at the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock on Friday; and a Stamps Bus Tour that visits the writer's childhood hometown on Saturday.

Janis F. Kearney is among the group's founders and its president. We caught up with Kearney in an email interview to find out more about the celebratory plans. Here's what she had to say:

 

Q: Can you talk about the significance of this three-day weekend celebration of Maya Angelou and how each event planned will connect with her legacy?

A: This year we're celebrating five years since we held our first Day of Remembrance in Stamps, Arkansas, on Oct. 17, 2014. It doesn't feel as if we've been doing this for five years, but it is significant because when we first decided to do something it was to celebrate Maya Angelou's life, and now five years later we're celebrating our work with young people, schools and communities. Out of our desire to make her name known throughout Arkansas, we are now going out and touching the lives of young people - in her name. Each of these three days is a celebration of course - October 17th, we have our Annual FriendRaiser that we hold each year. It's a time to say thank you to Arkansas for embracing us, and to schools and communities for opening their doors to us - and of course, for the youth who opened their hearts and dared to dream in the name of Maya Angelou. Our second day is unadulterated partying for a good cause. We have music, poetry, dance, a live auction and recognition of two women who epitomize so much of what Maya was about: art, education, community, humanity, civil and human rights. Garbo Hearne is an amazing curator of art and books, and a nurturer of community. We recognize Mrs. Beulah Flowers, posthumously, for her role in transforming Maya's life. She is the English teacher from Stamps who coerced Maya into speaking again. Maya credited her with changing the trajectory of her life. What would our world be without that critical transformation? Without the Maya who has touched us all in one way or another. And of course on the third day, we will make the sojourn to Stamps - so that people who have never been there, can say they stood beside the lake, or in the yard of the church or near the school where Maya walked, or prayed or played. For some who love her work and her words and wisdom, this will be a visit they will never forget.

 

Q: You will be touring Stamps, Arkansas, to visit Angelou's childhood home, a town that greatly affected her life. What might people learn on a trip like this that they would not be able to learn in any other way? What will tour-goers see and experience? What, in your mind, would Angelou want them to see?

A: That's a good question. Of course, the things that people would most like to see would be her home, and the store that represented so much of her childhood, but of course, neither of those buildings are there. There is the pond and the church and the roads she walked, and many of the buildings remain. And there will be the mayor who grew up there, a black woman who never dreamed that she would one day be mayor. She will have stories that she's heard, and some she may remember from her own childhood, to share. I think, however, as much as anything people will leave Stamps with their own thoughts on what it must have been like for a young Maya to become a teenager in a town like Stamps. It is often not the physical buildings, but the feelings one gets from breathing the same air, walking the same dirt or gravel roads that a woman like Maya walked - a woman who for most of us represents a greatness. And yet Stamps, Arkansas, is the place she lived and grew and transformed. There will be that opportunity to imagine a time in this small town when Maya walked the roads, arrived at the railroad station, entered the school, helped her grandmother in the store or sat with her grandmother on those hard benches inside the church. They will stand at the lake that Maya called a pond, and see with their mind's eye, Maya sitting on the bank, writing, or thinking, and imagining her future.

Q: The Celebrate! Maya Project is marking a milestone. How is the organization preparing to continue its mission into the future?

A: We are preparing our future by bringing in new people to help us in our efforts to reach more students. We continue to nurture funders and supporters to convince them that literacy and writing and reading and poetry are critical to children's learning. We want to increase our giving toward scholarships in these next five years. Rather than give three scholarships per year, we'd love to give twice that many. We have some work to do before we get there, but we start this year.

 

Q: The Celebrate! Maya Project takes Angelou's life and legacy into Arkansas schools. What do young students find most interesting about her? What resonates most with them?

A: Great question. They find most fascinating that she grew up in an Arkansas town, and then that it was a place as small as Stamps, Arkansas. What resonates with students, I find, is that hers was a life filled with hardships - most particularly her early life - and because of that her journey to who she became was not a perfectly straight journey. They are amazed and at the same time empowered by the knowledge that her life bears out the fact that there is no perfectly straight road leading to greatness - that it takes believing in oneself, and getting up every day putting one foot in front of another to get where you want to be. They are amazed at the beauty of her poetry, and that it was written for them, as much as it is for more sophisticated audiences of New York, or California or the world.

 

Q: If Maya were alive today, what do you think she'd want to say to the world? What special insight might she feel compelled to share?

A: That's a really hard question because Maya always had so much to say! But, she was always about truth, and I think she would say to the world, "Yes, we're in trouble, but no we won't fold into ourselves and give up." She would implore young people to fight to hold on to the best of America, and do the work to make this great country even better - the best America it has ever been. This time, for ALL Americans, because that's the only way it will truly work.

 

(On the Net: CelebrateMayaProject.org.) 

 

Upcoming Events