Dr. Maya Angelou is a celebrated poet, memoirist, novelist, educator, and civil rights activist. She is renowned for her series of autobiographies, the most famous being I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which was nominated for a National Book Award in 1970 (Bantam). She has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry, and received the Presidential Medal of Arts in 2000.

Sir Edward Burne-Jones(1833-1898) was a British artist associated with the Pre-Raphaelites, and ultimately as a leader of the Aesthetic movement. Despite the lack of an academic art education, Burne-Jones worked in watercolor and oil, pencil, in tapestries and stained-glass. His work was focused on ideals of beauty, and on art itself as an object of beauty.