https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14912627/Poet-Aaron-Barry-Vancouver-faked-woke.html

A poet said his career skyrocketed within the liberal literary scene by taking on minority personas to promote his work to publishers.

Aaron Barry, 29, of Vancouver, experienced the most success when he posed as writers with identities far from his own, even if the poems were blatantly 'trash.'

His reasoning behind the scheme was simple - to prove the poetry world is more concerned with writers' identities than the quality of their work.

'My thinking was that, if the industry - from small magazines to full-on publishing imprints - could get away with showing a clear preference toward certain groups and, in that same vein, a clear bias against other groups,' Barry began to DailyMail.com.

'Then there was nothing to say that such power couldn't be abused in the future, whether it be to adhere to shifting trends or politics, or to discriminate against additional demographics.

'Such treatment would leave writers in a state of peril and anxiety, forever having to look over their shoulders while navigating their careers.'

From 2023 to 2024, Barry had managed to fool 30 respected literary journals around the globe and got about 50 of his 'nonsensical' poems published.

He published dozens of pieces as Adele Nwankwo, a 'gender-fluid member of the Nigerian diaspora,' including one titled After Coming Out: A Wrestling Promo.'

'The CisBoys thought they could gang up on me and put an end to my championship pursuit?' the poem published in 2023 reads. 'Hah! I've got Toni Morrison books that hit harder than those bozos.

'Oh, and this would set the crowd ablaze, cause them to whisk in rattle homemade signs ("The Nigerian Nightmare," "Nwankwo 11:16," Step on My Balls, Kween Adele!)'

'The first poem to ever get picked up was the "yah jah gah hah" one,' Barry told The Free Press in an article published on Wednesday.

He was referring to one of Nwankwo's poems that was published in the Tofu Ink Arts Press, which has a mission of 'amplifying the voices of the under-represented.'

The poem kicks off with a Toni Morrison quote about 'navigating a white male world' and features lines such as 'voodoo prak tik casta oyal drip drip.'

'It was very obviously nonsense. Just fake bad Creole,' Barry explained to the outlet as he chuckled, baffled that the poem was accepted to begin with.

Another one of Barry's characters, b.h. fein, whose pronouns are 'its/complicated,' was actually nominated for a 2025 Best of the Net Award.

The intro of the award-worthy piece, titled Shakespeare's C*msl*t, reads: 'To ? or not to ? William Shakespeare’s ??? little c*msl*t ??? : that is the question.

Dirt Hogg Sauvage Respectfully, Claire Brooke Hawksmouth Sky Child, and Eleanor Neveah Mei are some of his other creative guises.

After years of blindsiding publishers, he finally started to pull the curtains down on his 'prank on the poetry world.'

'Well, someone had to do it. It was inevitable,' he dramatically declared on Substack at the start of April.

Although Barry did not share the news as himself, but as another one of his aliases - Jasper Ceylon.

While Ceylon more closely mirrored Barry's traits, his true identity would not be publicly revealed until months later when The Free Press shared his story.

He said he pulled off his stunt to 'test the limits of the poetry industry and just how much buffoonery it was willing to permit in the present day.'

Ceylon further detailed: 'I assumed a series of “attractive” pen names and as these personas sent upwards of fifty poems to English-language poetry journals the world over.

'These poems featured material that was farcical, inconsistent, inaccurate, prejudiced, and, in some cases, outright nonsensical, spanning every kind of style and subject matter seen in contemporary poetry.'

While they may have varied in tone or content, they all shared one commonality, he said: 'They were trash.'

'The worst part: Every single poem got published.'

Ceylon's shock admission caught instant social media attention, with magazine publishers who got tricked into working with him instantly sounding the alarm.

One of the people infuriated by Ceylon's 'true' identity was Chris Talbot, who uses they/them pronouns, a freelance editor and DEI consultant.

Talbot is the editor of B'K Magazine, which published one of Nwankwo’s poems last year.

'There's a white cis man, Jasper Ceylon, pretending to be a host of marginalized individuals in order to get published as them,' B'K Magazine shared on Instagram.

'He thinks it makes him clever and is trying to prove that publications will print anything as long as it comes from a marginalized person.'

Ceylon independently published an 'Anti-Poetry' collection called Echolalia Review the following month, containing the works of Nwankwo, Fein and other non-existent poets.

When Barry decided to completely drop the act and no longer hide behind Ceylon, he revealed he caught some flack from some of the editors he worked with.

S.A.B Marcie, yet another fake identity, is a biracial woman who was loosely inspired by Barry's then-girlfriend.

Marcie published a book called Femoid with the assistance of editor Derek White.

Before The Free Press shared Barry's feature piece, he decided to tell White the truth - and it did not go over well.

White pulled Femoid from the shelves and allegedly told Barry he's 'a terrible person.'

'I haven’t published a white male author for two years because I don’t want to deal with you guys, and if I had known you were a white male author I would not have accepted the book,' Barry claimed White told him.

White denied he does not work with white men while talking with The Free Press.

'No, it’s not that I don’t deal with straight white men, but if you looked at the context of the book, for a white man to write this book is absolutely wrong, and it would be unethical for me to publish it,' the deceived publisher said.

White said that Barry 'couldn't even write' and he only was willing to edit the book 'under the assumption that [the author] was like the character in the book: an uneducated black woman from Vancouver.'

>>1420839 (OP)
Why is this news?

>>1420839 (OP)
Good article, op.
Thanks for sharing

'So, I was trying to help her write this book, right? And wasted three months of my life,' he said, questioning if the former-girlfriend Marcie was inspired by even existed.

The Free Press confirmed that she does in fact exist, although far from 'uneducated' the article's author, River Page, inserted in the piece.

Marcie also wrote another novel, £, flesh, which is not yet published, with an editor who was unbothered by Barry's admission.

The book is still on track to be released, but it will cite Barry as the author.

Maxwell Rosenbloom, the book's editor, told The Free Press: 'I didn’t care. I thought it was funny. The work is very good. That’s what’s important to me.'

Now, Barry is looking ahead to continuing he poetry journey with nothing to hide.

He began his writing career in 2018, dabbling in haiku while recovering from an illness. He also works as an English tutor.

Barry had won local awards and been featured in haiku magazines before he delved into his bombshell 'experiment.'

'I don't care much for being swept up in the so-called "culture war" - that's small-picture stuff,' he told DailyMail.com.

'My interest with this and my other works (which the publisher of my first novel, the de-listed Femoid - which now needs a new publisher - didn't understand) is to explore ideas of artistic freedom and what you might call non-denominational creative liberty.

'In the end, I hope people will see from this that there's room for all types of writing and narratives in today's literary world, if only we'd stop being so adversarial and moralistic about things.'

>>1420844
because a based cishet White man beat the wokists at their own game.
>>1420845
thank you

>>1420845
The Daily Mail is incapable of writing a good article.
>>1420848
>cishet
>wokists
Good morning reddit how are you today?

>>1420850
>obsessing over reddit this much
go back

>>1420848
>because a based cishet White man beat the wokists at their own game.
You realize catfishing isn't much of anything? Bro just made up a more interesting persona than a random white guy.
>Guys I made my life sound much more interesting than it actually is and for some reason people started paying closer attention to me

>>1420839 (OP)
Remember kids, when you lie about your identity and background to get published or get attention, you're a fraudster. But if you claim you did it to "own the libs", you're a based prankster running le epic social experiment.

The thing this retard didn't think through is that he's probably going to get fucked sued for this and dropped by any future publishers for the rest of his life. He would've been better off using all the effort he put into making these personas to write something more interesting instead of making himself seem more interesting than he actually was.

>>1420852
cope and seethe

>>1420854
You wanna see seething, check back on this guy in a year. Publishers REALLY don't like fraudsters; he's basically blacklisted himself from the industry for this. Hope the shitpost was worth it because bro is gonna be stuck in self publishing hell for the rest of his career.

>>1420851
>obsessing over "wokists"
>accusing other people of obsessing
kek

>>1420839 (OP)
I actually bothered to look up this guy's other work and holy shit he's bland as fuck. His "intentionally bad" poems were more interesting than any of his work I can find and 4 of his 6 published books were just lists of shitty writing prompts.

>>1420848
>thank you
No worries, I call it like I see it

>>1420848
>>1420862
jesus christ just stop samefagging

>>1420866
Why do you get so angry that I positively reply to other people on this board?

>>1420866
jesus christ stop making up things in your head

>>1420867
>>1420868
No one is buying your act.

>>1420868
This

It's like this: if you can take advantage of a freebie, do it. I dated a girl who was Mex-American with about three drops of Native blood. She got a full ride to Kansas State thanks to that Pawnee blood and I don't blame her one bit.

>>1420850
>>1420852
>ITT: faggots upset that a straight white male beat them at their own game
What's that line again about not being judged by color of your skin but content of your character?

>>1420857
He isn't the first author to use an entire persona as a pen name. It's not fraudulent, but you're right, they're going to drop and blacklist him solely because the retarded publisher cared more about his race than his work. He can just pull a musk and go from grifting the left to grifting the right

>>1420895
He didn't beat shit. The dude submitted to publishers dedicated to promoting minority authors while pretending to be a minority. The irony is his "intentionally bad" poems were like leagues more interesting than his previously published ones, because from what I've seen of them they were bland as fuck.

>What's that line again about not being judged by color of your skin but content of your character?
The funny part is your claiming he got judged by what he lied about his skin color being, but in reality he probably got judged by his character because a poem from someone who is (claiming to be a) non-binary Ethiopian boxer who beat their bullies into submission sounds leagues more interesting a perspective to hear from than a random guy from Vancouver.

>>1420896
He's not the first to try this kind of thing, and the others all had their writing careers shrivel up and die just like his is about to. Turns out publishers and readers don't like getting bullshitted.

I bring up fraud because it's one thing to lie to publishers about your background to get published, but it's another thing entirely to basically catfish an editor who openly admitted that if he knew it wasn't autobiographical he never would've taken the job. That shit can get you taken to court if money changed hands.

>>1420897
>because a poem from someone who is (claiming to be a) non-binary Ethiopian boxer who beat their bullies into submission sounds leagues more interesting a perspective to hear from than a random guy from Vancouver
It's the same poem. The only thing that changed was his skin color... Gee I wonder why it did better this time?

>>1420897
>The dude submitted to publishers dedicated to promoting minority authors while pretending to be a minority
So what your saying is that he used the systemically racist system to gain privileges otherwise only afforded to these so-called minorities?

>>1420899
Reminds me of that guy who claimed he submitted a poem 40 times to a news paper under his name, then submitted it as a fake female asian name and got published. Except it turned out the reason he got published was because the publisher thought it was more interesting to hear someone asian write with a lot of very European themes and motifs.

Shockingly, people like an authentic perspective drawn from real world experiences, as opposed to a perspective drawn from a guy fucking larping.

>>1420902
>faggot who doesn't read the newspaper they're talking about complaining that the articles in that newspaper don't cater to them
Is that newspaper still in business?
Then its the right decision

OP's article about some triggered faggot wasting their time to fill magazine columns for free
How is he winning when he's out time and effort and the magazine made money? Sounds like he tricked himself into providing free labor like a chump

>>1420903
Honestly I don't even know what he got out of this outside of some brownie points with the purely hypothetical right wing poet community. He's blacklisted by publishers, his actual poems aren't that good, he says the ones he did submit are "intentionally bad" so he's not proud of them being out there regardless, and if he did get paid for this he's left himself ironically open to fraud charges because if he signed contracts under a fake persona they're null and void (though I don't think he received any money).

>>1420904
There are probably more people in this thread than members of the "right-wing poet community"

>>1420897
>The dude submitted to publishers dedicated to promoting minority authors while pretending to be a minorit
Im glad he turned the systematic racism up on his head and managed to get the same level of privilege as everyone else was getting.

Dunno how this sort of discriminatory practice is even legal, but good on this guy for taking advantage of it and beating them at their own game

>>1420909
You're using terms you don't understand again, anon.

I am a first Nations person. I am lactose intolerant and I tan real good. I want to take a DNA test to see what my lineage is, but I don't want the state to get my DNA, particularly the police, as I believe some of my relatives are rapists

>>1420909
I don't think you understand this dude's writing was shit and the only way he could get published was making up various increasingly outlandish personas that made his shitpost poems seem like a view into an interesting mind instead of just a white guy larping as various minorities.

>>1420920
That's exactly what I'm saying. He leveraged a systematically racist system by falsely claiming that he himself was part of the privileged class, and he received the same benefit they do, resulting in something being published that otherwise wouldn't be published if not due to their privileges

>>1420920
That's exactly what I'm saying. He exploited a systematically racist organization by falsely claiming that he himself was part of the privileged class, and he ended up receiving the same benefit they do, resulting in something being published that otherwise wouldn't be published without such a privilege

>>1420911
I know exactly what the terms mean you just aren't happy that this event can be accurately described as such

>>1420909
>>1420925
>>1420926
Really embodying that
>You do not fit in here
>Okay we will make our own place
>Why are you excluding us
>You do not fit in here
comic aren't you?

Funny part is this guy's poems he said he made intentionally bad are more interesting structurally and thematically than his "good" ones. What I could find from him online was dull as shit; not hard to see why he didn't get published.

>>1420925
Yeah he falsely claimed he was part of the incredibly privileged class of "minority without an education".

This shit is like lying you have a disability to join the Special Olympics so you can prove how "privileged and discriminatory" they are for not accepting you as someone without a disability. He's owning no one and instead just looking pathetic.

>>1420926
You clearly don't.

>>1420930
Did you just call minorities intellectually disabled?

I'm a poet & you know it,...,...........
Because my Epicanthal......................... ..................folds show it

>>1420928
Theyre not more interesting. The content of the poems was largely disregarded because of his presumed identity. Thats what explicitly was said in the article. So the identity was accepted, not the poetry.

It reminds me a lot of this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair

Same energy. It's nice to see smug academic types with egg on their face.

>>1420947
>The content of the poems was largely disregarded because of his presumed identity
No you fucking retard. They took his LARP personas as a factor in his poems because it offered additional perspective into why they were written the way they were. It's the difference between someone from an actual poor background describing the way they grew up and the effect it had on their life and education, and a random guy who's pretending to be the same but has literally no experience in it. Hell, considering how he commented it, he never even bothered submitting the same poems under his real identity, instead making entirely new bad poems that ironically seem more interesting than the ones he published in the past.

It's funny you bring up the grievance studies affair, because they are similar in this regard; a retard tries to prove a point by being intentionally deceptive, which ironically at the end of the day is just them being unethical within their field no matter what platitudes they try to use to justify it. They lied about their research and results. This dude lied about where his stories were coming from. And it's probably gonna end the same way; the only one of the people who was behind the Grievance Studies Affair who had a professor position promptly lost it for it because he did research fraud, and this guy is almost certainly getting blacklisted in the publishing industry for this stunt.

>>1420947
>Theyre not more interesting
Really? Because his poems that he made intentionally bad with a ton of emojis were more interesting than his published work.
>https://www.defenestrationmag.net/2019/12/two-poems-by-aaron-barry/
>Literally a fucking knock knock joke and a dad joke

>>1420839 (OP)
democrats are anti white racist monsters news at 11

"Mediocre poet refuses to get a real job, panders to Right-wing reactionaires instead of improving on his craft"
And gee, look for yourself how much traction it's granted him: https://x.com/jceylon2?t=mBx5GQb12MdYFODljEzHwA&s=09
Really shooting himself in the foot, because how many Right wingers do you actually think care about Poetry as an art? Right wingers are enamoured with generating AI slop and also hate humanity. They don't care about any kind of art that, god forbid, requires introspection.

>>1420947
Good post

>>1420953
And here is his [shortlisted] Haiku from The 2021 Touchstone Awards for Individual Poems
"as the crow flies
fentanyl"
Wow. Riveting

>>1420983
How is your village today, Ranjeet?

>>1420991
this website really got under your skin huh

>>1420991
>Everyone who disagrees with me is secretly Indian
As if Indians don't suck white cock on social media on a daily basis for rupies. This nigga's 'real' poetry is lame, tonality-wise and overall substance-wise.

>>1420902
>Shockingly, people like an authentic perspective drawn from real world experiences, as opposed to a perspective drawn from a guy fucking larping.

Isn't that the exact opposite conclusion of what it means being published under a fake persona, aka larping?

>>1420902
>the publisher thought it was more interesting to hear someone asian write with a lot of very European themes and motifs
That's pretty discriminatory tho. Literally made a selection because of someone's ethnicity

>>1421036
>it's discriminatory to find this context more interesting than that context!
They made the selection because someone with that background writing in that way is unique. Same way you see those videos proclaiming amazement of a white guy ordering in perfect chinese but not the same for the chinese guy ordering in perfect chinese.

>>1421035
>Isn't that the exact opposite conclusion of what it means being published under a fake persona, aka larping?
No retard. When you lie about it being based on real experiences when it's just fiction, that makes you a fraudster. If I told you I actually once escaped from a north korean super prison with nothing but a spoon, you'd want to hear that story. If I then told you "actually none of that happened and I made it all up", you wouldn't care.

>>1421041
>because someone with that background
Background? No, you are just trying to use a substitute word for "ethnicity". The exact words used in my reply were "someone asian"

>>1421045
trump still fucked kids and is trying to cover it up. nixon is truly a saint in comparison

>>1421049
>trump still fucked kids
Proof?

>>1421052
LOL

LMAO

you're lllllliterally a shill. i would kms if i had your job

>>1421055
No proof.
Not surprising.
Care to drop at least a conspiracy theory or something instead of having a melty?

>>1421062
we will all remember the 180 from being qtards to covering up the biggest child sex scandal in history, and we will remember it for the rest of our lives. you cannot effectively doctor this reality, shill. even brainwashed magatards don't buy it

>>1420952
10/10 gaslighting
made me reply