Sherman Alexie on his decision to include a poem by a white poet masquerading as an Asian-American poet in Best American Poetry

Here. His decision is the subject of heated debate right now in the poetry world. It may be unpopular, but I think Alexie did the right thing. There is after all at least a fiction that we value poems based on their artistic achievement, not based on who wrote them. The privileged poet who submitted under an ethnic pen name was misguidedly trying to prove that wrong and was sadly blind to his own privilege as a white male poet, but if Alexie had retroactively ousted his poem based on the misleading pen name it would seem to suggest that the value of poems is all about who wrote them. In which case, we may as well leave writing to the already famous.