Born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis in 1928, Maya Angelou was raised by her grandmother in segregated Arkansas from the ages of three to seven. Angelou was influenced at an early age by the work of writers like Shakespeare and Paul Laurence Dunbar. In the 1960s she was sought out by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to be the northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization dedicated to using nonviolent protest to end racism and achieve civil rights for African Americans. In 1993, at the request of President Clinton, she wrote and read a poem for his inauguration. Angelou says the basic message in that poem is fundamental to all her work: "What I try to say is that as human beings we are more alike than we are unalike."

Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1872 to Matilda and Joshua Dunbar. His mother was a former slave. His father escaped slavery by way of the Underground Railroad and joined the Union army in the Civil War. Encouraged by his mother's love of poetry, Dunbar was writing and reciting poems by the age of six. His father's heroism in the Civil War was the inspiration for several of Dunbar's later poems and stories. Dunbar published his first collection of poems, Oak and Ivy, in 1892 and sold copies of the book for a dollar each at the first World's Fair. He went on to publish twelve books of poetry, four books of short stories, a play, and five novels before his death on February 9, 1906.