A new U.S. quarter featuring the late Maya Angelou went into circulation Monday, the U.S. Mint announced, making the legendary poet and activist the first Black woman ever to appear on the coin.

The Maya Angelou quarter is the first in the American Women Quarters Program, which will include coins featuring prominent women in American history. Other quarters in the series will begin rolling out later this year and through 2025, the U.S. Mint said in a release on Monday.

"Each time we redesign our currency, we have the chance to say something about our country -- what we value, and how we've progressed as a society," Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a separate statement. "I'm very proud that these coins celebrate the contributions of some of America's most remarkable women, including Maya Angelou."

The new coin still features George Washington's facade on the "heads" side, while the "tails" side honors Angelou by evoking one of her most famous works, the autobiography "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings."

Lawmakers cheered the release of the new coin on Monday and credited Rep. Barbara Lee, a California Democrat, with the achievement. Lee introduced the Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act of 2020, which passed in January 2021 and ultimately paved the way for the creation of these new coins.

"The phenomenal women who shaped American history have gone unrecognized for too long -- especially women of color," Lee said in a tweet. "Proud to have led this bill to honor their legacies."

The U.S. Mint invited the public to submit names of women they view as American icons. The bureau welcomed entries of women known for their work in civil rights, science and the arts, among other areas, with an emphasis on women from "ethnically, racially and geographically diverse backgrounds."

The only requirement was that the women who appear on the coins must be deceased.

The agency will issue four other quarters this year, with the others honoring Sally Ride, an astronaut who was the first American woman in space; Asian American actress Anna May Wong; Cherokee Nation leader Wilma Mankiller and suffragette and politician Nina Otero-Warren.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Dozens of email accounts at the Treasury Department were compromised in the massive breach of U.S. government agencies being blamed on Russia.

That's according to an Oregon Democrat, Sen. Ron Wyden, who says hackers broke into systems used by the department’s highest-ranking officials.

Wyden issued a statement Monday after he and other members of the Senate Finance Committee were briefed by the IRS and the Treasury Department.

Wyden says that though there is no indication that taxpayer data was compromised, the hack “appears to be significant." In addition, the breach appears to involve the theft of encryption keys from U.S. government servers, Wyden said.

“Treasury still does not know all of the actions taken by hackers, or precisely what information was stolen,” Wyden said in a statement.

It is also not clear what Russian hackers intend to do with any emails they may have accessed.

A Treasury Department spokeswoman declined to comment on Wyden’s statement.

Treasury was among the earliest known agencies reported to have been affected in a breach that now encompasses a broad spectrum of departments. The effects and consequences of the hack are still being assessed, though the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity arm said in a statement last week that the intrusion posed a “grave” risk to government and private networks.

In the Treasury Department’s case, Wyden said, the breach began in July. But experts believe the overall hacking operation began months earlier when malicious code was slipped into updates to popular software that monitors computer networks of businesses and governments.