On Monday, about 1,000 people, most of them young women, lined up at a New York City theater for a poetry reading by Rupi Kaur. Giant fake sunflowers outside made a safe space for guests to pose for Instagram in their hijabs, baseball caps, pantsuits, combat boots and cocktail dresses.

Then on Tuesday came a big and quietly savage profile in The Cut. On Wednesday, The Guardian published an article on the “inevitable backlash” against her. What a week!

Ms. Kaur, who is 25 and Punjabi-Canadian, is used to the ups and downs. In the three years since her blockbuster “Milk and Honey” was first self-published and later picked up by Andrews McMeel Publishing, she has dealt with all the issues other women face on Instagram and off: comparisons, aggression, bullying. But she has also built a community and an audience there in particular, with 1.6 million followers. Daunted by the tough stuff, she remained, because “it came back to the accessibility,” she said.

“Instagram makes my work so accessible and I was able to build a readership,” Ms. Kaur said recently in a cafe in SoHo. “But then I always feel like within the literary world there’s of course downsides, because you have that label attached to your work and then, for some reason, that means you aren’t a credible literary source.”