Rumors of Maya Angelou's death greatly exaggerated

Rumors of Maya Angelou's death greatly exaggerated

"Maya Angelou":http://www.mayaangelou.com says rumors of her illness or death are greatly exaggerated. She is alive and well. The world-renowned "Pulitzer Prize":http://www.pulitzer.org nominated author and poet was actually near St. Louis today at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville for an event called "An Afternoon with "Maya Angelou":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Angelou." Her agent says there were untrue reports on "TMZ.com":http://www.TMZ.com saying the author had been taken to a hospital in Los Angeles. She started receiving calls about the report while on her tour bus en route to the event. The 81-year-old Angelou says she is fine and was quite disturbed when relatives as far away as Europe and Africa called her in tears to make sure she was still alive and well. Angelou gained worldwide fame with her literary activism in the civil rights movement and for works like "I know why the caged bird sings":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Know_Why_the_Caged_Bird_Sings," an autobiographical account of her childhood and early teenage years. She was nominated for the "Pulitzer Prize":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize for her 1971 poetry collection, "Just give me a cool drink of water 'fore I die."