NEW YORK (AP) – More than 300 boxes of Maya Angelou's personal papers, including letters from Malcolm X and James Baldwin and several scribbled revisions of the poem she wrote to celebrate President Bill Clinton's inauguration, will be made public at a New York library, the author said.

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture plans to announce the papers' acquisition.

Angelou, 82, said she sought out the Harlem institution – a research unit of the New York Public Library – as a home for works that include notes for her acclaimed autobiography 'I know Why the Caged Bird Sings' and the 1993 inaugural poem 'On the Pulse of Morning'.

Angelou said this week that she revised the poem about ten times before getting it right. "I had to continue to go back for the melody of the language," she said.

"People all over the world use words; (then) the writer comes along and has to use these most-in-use objects, put together a few nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives ... and pull them together and make them bounce, throw them against the wall and make people say, 'I never thought of it that way."'

The Schomburg Center said the poem's draft is in one of nearly 350 boxes containing personal and professional correspondence, drafts, handwritten manuscripts and fan mail. It said that it has barely skimmed the surface of the material and that processing it will take up to two years.

"This is the essence that covers her literary career," Schomburg director Howard Dodson said.

The deal was sealed after a two-year negotiation, said Dodson, who has known Angelou for 20 years. He declined to reveal the terms.