Ahead of the 30th anniversary of the UK’s deadliest firearms atrocity, Rachael Irvine tells her story for the first time ...

To understand this poem, you don’t need biography. Your own personal understanding of the loss of innocence and the pain of mortality serve just as well as Thomas’s disastrous attempts at adulting.

Her landmark book “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” was among the first 20th-century autobiographies of a Black woman to reach a wide readership.

A few interpretations of the rhyme are light-hearted, but many are far darker — like the theory that it’s a metaphor for the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. So, what does the “Jack and ...