A young man pretended to be “a gender-fluid member of the Nigerian diaspora,” and wrote intentionally bad poems. He got 47 of his poems published, reports The Free Press (Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa).
One of the poems he got published by pretending to be black was this awful poem:
Today, the publishing industry seems to prefer that poets and writers not be white. As Jacob Savage explained in “The Vanishing White Male Writer,”
Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down. Between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations). The past decade has seen 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize—with again, not a single straight white American millennial man. Of 14 millennial finalists for the National Book Award during that same time period, exactly zero are white men. The Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a launching pad for young writers, currently has zero white male fiction and poetry fellows (of 25 fiction fellows since 2020, just one was a white man). Perhaps most astonishingly, not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker (at least 24, and probably closer to 30, younger millennials have been published in total).
