Poet Michael Derrick Hudson was published in The Best American Poetry 2015 anthology under the name “Yi-Fen Chou.” Hudson claims to use this name as a “strategy” for getting poems published.
by Isaac Fitzgerald
Source: http://www.buzzfeed.com/isaacfitzgerald/yi-fen-chou-is-michael-derrick-hudson#.ljkm9RZAe1
The poetry world was shocked Monday to discover that Yi-Fen Chou, a poet who appears in the anthology The Best American Poetry 2015, is actually the pen name of Michael Derrick Hudson.
Michael Derrick Hudson a/k/a Yi-Fen Chou via poetryfoundation.org
Hudson’s poem “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:
Many in the literary community took to social media to raise their concerns about the publication of Hudson’s poem in light of his nom de plume.
But Sherman Alexie, guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2015 — and in some sense originally a victim of a hoax — defended his decision to publish the poem, even after learning that Yi-Fen Chou was a pseudonym.
Details at: http://www.buzzfeed.com/isaacfitzgerald/yi-fen-chou-is-michael-derrick-hudson#.ljkm9RZAe1
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