For better or worse, after winning the Pulitzer and winning the support of the Establishment (e.g. academic gigs, publication via major trade publisher, invitations to fancy readings), she allowed herself to be changed by the times.
And then: She changed. For better or worse, after winning the Pulitzer and winning the support of the Establishment (e.g. academic gigs, publication via major trade publisher, invitations to fancy readings), she allowed herself to be changed by the times. “I thought,” she says in a 1991 reading for Poets in Person, “that if blacks were nice enough and proper enough, all would be ok,” but some young black poets at a conference in Fisk University, who were creating the Black Arts Movement, changed that perspective.