High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The works of Maya Angelou encompass autobiography, poetry, plays, screenplays for television and film, directing, acting, and speaking. She is best known for her series of six autobiographies, starting with the critically acclaimed I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), which was nominated for a National Book Award. Angelou did not write Caged Bird with the intention of writing a series of autobiographies, but critics have "judged the subsequent autobiographies in light of the first".