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As writer Hilton Als states, Angelou was one of the first African-American female writers to publicly discuss her personal life, and one of the first to use herself as a central character in her books, something she continues in "Traveling Shoes". Writer Julian Mayfield, who calls her first autobiography "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" "a work of art that eludes description", states that Angelou's work sets a precedent not only for other Black women writers, but for the genre of autobiography as a whole.