Maya angelous stamp
Maya angelous stamp, The Postal Service said Wednesday that it had no plans to reissue a stamp honoring Maya Angelou that features a quotation from a book by another author.
The quotation — “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song” — has often been attributed to Ms. Angelou, the poet and author who died last year at age 86, but it is actually from a 1967 book of poems by Joan Walsh Anglund, a writer of children’s books.
A spokesman for the Postal Service, David Partenheimer, said that Ms. Angelou had cited the quotation frequently in interviews and that it provided a connection to her 1969 autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”
The sentence was chosen to accompany her image on the stamp to reflect her passion for the written and spoken word,” he said in an email. “The sentence held great meaning for her, and she is publicly identified with its popularity.”
Postal Service officials said they had not heard of Ms. Anglund’s book, “A Cup of Sun,” until asked about it by The Washington Post, which published an article about the stamp on Monday. Ms. Anglund, 89, told The Post that she was a fan of Ms. Angelou’s and hoped that the stamp would be successful.
In 2013, President Obama attributed the quotation to Ms. Angelou while honoring other artists at the presentation of the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal. After Ms. Angelou’s death, it was widely cited as one of her most inspirational quotations. Ms. Angelou referred to it herself in an interview with the Greek music blog Blues, but she did not claim ownership of it.
The stamp was unveiled Tuesday at a ceremony in Washington that was attended by Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, the poet and activist Nikki Giovanni and Ms. Angelou’s grandson Colin Johnson.
The quotation — “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song” — has often been attributed to Ms. Angelou, the poet and author who died last year at age 86, but it is actually from a 1967 book of poems by Joan Walsh Anglund, a writer of children’s books.
A spokesman for the Postal Service, David Partenheimer, said that Ms. Angelou had cited the quotation frequently in interviews and that it provided a connection to her 1969 autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”
The sentence was chosen to accompany her image on the stamp to reflect her passion for the written and spoken word,” he said in an email. “The sentence held great meaning for her, and she is publicly identified with its popularity.”
Postal Service officials said they had not heard of Ms. Anglund’s book, “A Cup of Sun,” until asked about it by The Washington Post, which published an article about the stamp on Monday. Ms. Anglund, 89, told The Post that she was a fan of Ms. Angelou’s and hoped that the stamp would be successful.
In 2013, President Obama attributed the quotation to Ms. Angelou while honoring other artists at the presentation of the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal. After Ms. Angelou’s death, it was widely cited as one of her most inspirational quotations. Ms. Angelou referred to it herself in an interview with the Greek music blog Blues, but she did not claim ownership of it.
The stamp was unveiled Tuesday at a ceremony in Washington that was attended by Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, the poet and activist Nikki Giovanni and Ms. Angelou’s grandson Colin Johnson.