White author steals Asian pen name "Yi-Fen Chou" to get published more often

The poetry world was shocked to discover that "Yi-Fen Chou" is actually the pen name of a white dude named Michael Derrick Hudson. What?

Hudson’s poem, titled “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve,” was both originally published in Prairie Schooner and reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2015 under the name Yi-Fen Chou.

In his bio for the anthology, Hudson admits that he used the pen name of Yi-Fen Chou as a strategy for getting his poems accepted by literary journals.

"The poem in question, 'The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve,' was rejected under my real name forty (40) times before I sent it out as Yi-Fen Chou (I keep detailed submission records). As Yi-Fen the poem was rejected nine (9) times before Prairie Schooner took it. If indeed this is one of the best American poems of 2015, it took quite a bit of effort to get it into print, but I'm nothing if not persistent," he writes.

If there is such a thing as employing yellowface in poetry, this has to be it. Hudson claims that he regularly submits his poetry under the name "Yi-Fen" after being rejected "a multitude of times" under his real name. The strategy has apparently turned out to be "quite successful" for him.

Best American Poetry 2015 editor Sherman Alexie has posted a lengthy piece speaking out about what went into anthology's selection process.

He was unaware that "Yi-Fen Chou" was a pen name for a white male poet, and explains why he kept "that poetry colonist" in the book even after he learned of his pseudonymic deception.