New APPS

I just heard the news that Dr. Maya Angelou died today.  I had the enormous privilege to take a class with her as an undergraduate at Wake Forest, and it was a singular experience.  It was not just her elegant command of the classroom – though I’ve seen few others whose personal presence equaled hers – it was that she taught literature that I didn’t even know existed: Garcia Lorca, Soyinka, Baldwin and Fanon, among others.  She started the course by having us write down the line from Terence: “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto” (I am a human, I consider nothing human as alien to me – yes, she made us write it in Latin, though she always added the translation), and over a series of uncomfortable texts, kept returning to the Terence as a way to stop us from distancing ourselves from them. It left as deep an impression as any course I took before or after.  It was only after her class that I read her own work and learned of her extraordinary life.  As discussions and tributes to her literature appear, we should pause to note that the world has also lost a great teacher.