Tavis Smiley recounts the story of his friendship with Maya Angelou. Tavis Smiley and Maya Angelou met in 1986, when he was twenty-one and she was fifty- eight. For the next twenty-eight years, Angelou was a teacher and a maternal figure to Smiley, and they talked often of art, politics, history, music, religion, and race. In MY JOURNEY WITH MAYA, Smiley beautifully recalls a friendship filled with conversation that began when he, a recent college graduate and a poor kid from a big family in the Midwest, accompanied the revered writer on a sojourn to Ghana. Smiley stumbled into a relationship with her that shaped his