Maya Angelou Interview with Howl

Howl is a unique publication in that is is staffed entirely by high school students, but open to submissions. Howl publishes book reviews, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and art online as well as producing an inaugural print publication. Cool, too, Howl offered a screening of the film Big Fish directed by Tim Burton, followed by a Skype talk with the book’s author, Daniel Wallace.

Howl has established quite a name for itself this past year as the students interviewed 10 Pulitzer Prize winning authors and other award winning writers, among them, Maya Angelou. The interview with Angelou took place on February 26, 2014, which Dylan Emerick-Brown, English teacher and faculty adviser for the student-run literary arts magazine says is the last known recorded interview of the author before her passing in May of this year. The recording has been accepted for archive by the Library of Congress.

Angelou closed her comments to the interview with this: “Poetry, when it is done right, can be of use to anybody . . . But good poetry belongs to everybody all the time. And to the young men and women in Mr. Brown’s class, continue…continue to read and to write. Continue, my dears, to read and to write, and read aloud.”