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When Marguerite Johnson, better known to us all as Maya Angelou, passed away earlier this week at the age of 86, a true Renaissance Woman exitted life’s center stage.

Born into an era that clung tightly to the tenets of sexism and Jim Crow-authored bigotry, Ms. Angelou transformed her hard-knock life by doing all that she was told was impossible. She took on singing, dancing, directing, acting and authoring books. She took moments of pain and created prose capable of healing hearts, soothing souls and later, even leading the nation in welcoming a new president.

Angelou was a woman who learned early on about the power of her voice: Showing off with a fresh mouth to a white store clerk got her shipped away from Arkansas to California for her own safety. Later, at the age of seven, when her confession of sexual assault by her mother’s then-boyfriend led to relatives beating him to death. “I thought, my voice killed him; I killed that man, because I told his name. And then I thought I would never speak again, because my voice would kill anyone,” she wrote.

In the years of self-imposed silence that followed, her older brother Bailey and first mentor, Bertha Flowers, encouraged Maya’s individuality and growing gifts of poetic self-expression.

Regal and statuesque at 6 feet tall, Angelou personified a unconventional and boldly-traveled journey. Her tumultuous early years and teenage motherhood led to a myriad of legal and illegal jobs (fry cook, brothel manager and even prostitute, to name a few) could’ve perpetuated a deepening downward spiral.

Instead, Maya’s obstacles fueled the contents of her classic memoirs (I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings and Gather Together In My Name, etc.) and schooled generations of readers about the too often overlooked perspectives on racism and sexism and African-American women. Along the way, she followed her other artistic leanings into professional dance and stage performance, becoming the ‘Exotic Maya Angelou’ who performed Calypso in clubs before regaling audiences in a touring stage production of Porgy and Bess.

Ultimately, those of us who read between the lines of her signature quotes learned from Ms. Angelou’s experiences to honor the best of ourselves, seek the best in one another and bloom where we were planted. Angst over her two-timing husband, for example, didn’t keep Ms. Angelou from becoming a respected journalist in his native South Africa.

In the end, there was a reason why Maya Angelou earned so many honors (including The Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011) and was considered a mother and mentor to millions, including myself: her zest for navigating an incredible, yet imperfect life.

No matter how uncertain those days became, Ms. Angelou forged past the dilemmas to channel that inner ‘Phenomenal Woman’ and, unknowingly, created a template of excellence for Generation Next: “I believe all the tools that have been given to me that I recognized, I have developed,” Ms. Angelou said in her 1989 I Dream A World; Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America essay. “They may have been given to me as crowbars and I’ve tried to turn them into levers.”