Killing John Cabot and publishing black: Gwendolyn Brooks's Riot.

In the late 1960s, at the height of her career, Gwendolyn Brooks .changed publishers, switching from Harper & Row, a major press that could give her widespread distribution and publicity, to small, new, African American-run Broadside Press. Harper & Row had just published arguably her most accomplished book, In the Mecca. in 1968. Sloughing off, the very next year, great stretches of her mainstream-poetry-buying public was a profoundly anti-economic move. Many who had bought her work in the past would now have significant difficulty finding it--indeed, even learning it…