Welcome to Her Table Maya Angelou Shares Warm Stories, Tempting Recipes in Memoirs

Ammeson, Jane, Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, IL)

Byline: Jane Ammeson Daily Herald Correspondent

With the same sweet, strong voice she uses in her award-winning poetry and best-selling books, Maya Angelou now turns to a favorite and long enduring passion - food.

"I've always wanted to write about food," she says, explaining why she authored the recently published "Hallelujah! The Welcome Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes" (Random House, $29.95).

"I know that all over the world in every culture when friends or families or people get together to celebrate or to mourn there's always food," she says. "Every rite of passage, whether it's marriage or funerals or people coming of age, there's always food and it can be used as a technique to flirt or to let someone know that I never want to see you again."

Angelou, 76, a poet, writer, performer, teacher and director who holds the prestigious Reynolds Chair at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., wrote many best sellers, including the famed "I Know Why a Caged Bird Sings" and has won two Grammy Awards in the Best Spoken Word category. She read her poem, "On the Pulse of Morning," at the inauguration of President William Clinton.

In "Hallelujah!," she kneads together wonderfully re-created recollections from throughout her life with the foods that made them memorable. We taste the crackling cornbread warm from her grandmother's oven, feel her pride as she roasts a turkey and makes cornbread stuffing for a group of scholars in an Italian villa and laugh when she recounts a tale of pot roast …

Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information: Article title: Welcome to Her Table Maya Angelou Shares Warm Stories, Tempting Recipes in Memoirs. Contributors: Ammeson, Jane - Author. Newspaper title: Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, IL). Publication date: October 13, 2004. Page number: 1. © 2009 Paddock Publications. COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group.

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