For the past three years, the Office of Wake Downtown in conjunction with a variety of university and community organizations has hosted the Maya Angelou Garden Party every April at Bailey Park in Downtown Winston-Salem. This party began when our very own Wake Downtown Student Ambassadors discovered Dr. Angelou’s previous love of Garden Parties! For 30 years Dr. Maya Angelou inspired generations of Wake Forest students to become better writers, thinkers and citizens. She frequently enjoyed “garden parties” with friends and family in her own backyard. Bailey Park has served as a wonderful location to celebrate her birthday, uniting natural beauty with the vibrant cultural and arts community in downtown Winston-Salem. We use this event each year to celebrate community, storytelling, art and the spirit of one of the most influential artists, poets, and voices of our time, the incomparable Dr. Maya Angelou.

This year due to growing concerns regarding the spread of the COVID-19 virus, the Garden party was not able to take place in person. Although this news was disheartening to many, we chose to transition the programming into a pre-recorded podcast to be curated and shared with all. We have collected various original poems and spoken words that have been included in this podcast from all of our amazingly talented community and university volunteers. Not only have we included some incredible clips from various interviews with Dr. Angelou, but we have also included a number of choice songs that truly celebrate the vibrancy of life. Many of the songs Dr. Angelou herself deemed to be ones she could not live without in an interview from 1987 with Michael Parkinson.

Support the show (https://wakedowntown.wfu.edu/community/maya-angelou-garden-party/)