The Who We Are design features the literary ICONS Faith Ringgold, Maya Angelou, Virginia Hamilton, and Toni Morrison: 
Faith Ringgold: Born 1930 in Harlem, New York, Faith Ringgold is a painter, mixed media sculptor, performance artist, writer, teacher and lecturer. She received her B.S. and M.A. degrees in visual art from the City College of New York in 1955 and 1959. Ringgold has also received 23 Honorary Doctorates. During the early 1960’s Ringgold traveled in Europe and then created her first political paintings, The American People Series from 1963 to 1967. In the early 1970’s Ringgold began making tankas, soft sculptures and masks. She later utilized this medium in her masked performances of the 1970’s and 80’s. Ringgold’s first story quilt Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima? was written in 1983, the addition of text to her quilts has developed into a unique medium and style all her own. Faith Ringgold’s first book, the award winning Tar Beach was published in 1991. It has won over 20 awards including the Caldecott Honor and the Coretta Scott King award for the best-illustrated children’s book of 1991, and an animated version with was created by HBO in 2010. The original painted story quilt, Tar Beach, is in the permanent collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Ringgold continues to write and create award winning works. 
Maya Angelou: An acclaimed American poet, storyteller, activist, and autobiographer, Maya Angelou was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Angelou had a broad career as a singer, dancer, actress, composer, and Hollywood’s first female black director, but also became famous as a writer, editor, essayist, playwright, and poet. Angelou worked for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and also served as a professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University. One of Angelou’s most famous work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was written in 1969. She served on two presidential committees, in 1975 and in 1977. In 2000, Angelou was awarded the National Medal of Arts and in 2010, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the U.S. Angelou was awarded over 50 honorary degrees before her death in 2014 at the age of 86. 
Virginia Hamilton: Virginia Esther Hamilton was born on March 12, 1934. Virginia graduated at the top of her high-school class and received a full scholarship to Antioch College. In 1956, she transferred to the Ohio State University and majored in literature and creative writing. In her lifetime, Virginia wrote and published 41 books in multiple genres that spanned picture books, folktales, mysteries, science fiction, realistic novels and biographies. Woven into her books is a deep concern with memory, tradition, and generational legacy, especially as they helped define the lives of African Americans. Virginia described her work as "Liberation Literature." She has won every major award in youth literature.
Toni Morrison: Toni Morrison was born February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio. She was an American writer noted for her examination of black experience, particularly the black female experience. She attended Howard University (B.A., 1953) and Cornell University (M.A., 1955). After teaching at Texas Southern University for two years, she taught at Howard from 1957 to 1964. In 1965 Morrison became a fiction editor at Random House, where she worked for a number of years. In 1984 she began teaching writing at the State University of New York at Albany, which she left in 1989 to join the faculty of Princeton University; she retired in 2006. Morrison's cataolgue of work includes some of the most memorable literary works of all time, such as The Bluest Eye. She has received numerous awards, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. Morrsion died August 5, 2019.