A white man couldn't get his poem published, so he made up a Chinese pen name — and it worked

Writers are nothing if not persistent. Michael Derrick Hudson, a white man from Indiana — and a genealogist, no less — decided it would be appropriate to fake his racial background in the interest of publishing a poem he authored. After getting 40 rejections to his submission, "The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve," Hudson needed a new strategy, The Washington Post reports.

So he took to submitting his work under a Chinese-American pen name, Yi-Fen Chou. Lo and behold, it was accepted into the Fall 2014 issue of the literary journal Prairie Schooner, along with a couple of Hudson's other pieces. From there, "The Bees" wound up in a pile of recommendations for the 2015 edition of The Best American Poetry, out Tuesday. It was 1 of 75 poems fellow poet and judge Sherman Alexie selected for the anthology in a field of more than 1,000.

After getting word of the poem's placement, Hudson wrote to Alexie to reveal his ruse, as detailed in Hudson's bio, but the judge didn't pull the entry. Heated debate ensued.

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"If I'd pulled the poem then I would have been denying that I gave the poem special attention because of the poet's Chinese pseudonym," Alexie wrote in a blog post Monday, acknowledging that his first instinct was to pull it. "If I'd pulled the poem then I would have been denying that I was consciously and deliberately seeking to address past racial, cultural, social, and aesthetic injustices in the poetry world."

Alexie's full explanation is here, and well worth reading for its thought-provoking points on identity politics and publishing ethics.