Of Nightingales That Weep Award from the Children's Literature Association as the best English-language children's book that did not win a major award when it was originally published twenty years earlier. The award is named after the mythical bird phoenix, which is reborn from its ashes, to suggest the book's rise from obscurity. Set during the Genpei War, the two rival Japanese clans, the Genji and Heike, are constantly battling for the support of the Senior Cloistered Emperor and the power to rule Japan. Takiko is a beautiful girl who can talentedly play the koto, a thirteen-stringed instrument. She is only eleven years old
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings unsettled life in "Caged Bird" suggests her sense of self "as perpetually in the process of becoming, of dying and being reborn, in all its ramifications". African-American literature scholar Dolly McPherson agrees, stating that Angelou creatively uses Christian mythology and theology to present the Biblical themes of death, regeneration, and rebirth. As Lauret indicates, Angelou and other female writers in the late 1960s and early 1970s used autobiography to reimagine ways of writing about women's lives and identities in a male-dominated society. Up until this time, Black women were not depicted realistically in African-American fiction and autobiography, meaning that Angelou