NEW YORK (AP) – Sherman Alexie is defending his decision to include a poem by a white man writing under a Chinese pen name in the “Best American Poetry” anthology for 2015.
Alexie, an award-winning poet and fiction writer, wrote a long blog post over the weekend in which he acknowledged his anger and embarrassment upon learning that Yi-Fen Chou’s “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve” was in fact composed by Michael Derrik Hudson.
Alexie, who was told of Yi-Fen’s real identity by Hudson himself, wrote on blog.bestamericanpoetry.com that personal embarrassment would have been the only reason for removing the poem.
Hudson acknowledges in the book’s biographical notes that he called himself Yi-Fen Chou because the poem had been rejected 40 times under his own name.