In response to the controversy over his decision to include “Yi-Fen Chou’s” poem in the Best American Poetry anthology even after discovering that Yi-Fen Chou was actually a pen name that a white poet named Michael Derrick Hudson used in order to get published, Alexie admitted that, to him, dumping the poem would have undermined his decision to use racial bias in his selection process. Excluding the poem, he said, “would have cast doubt on every poem I have chosen for BAP. It would have implied that I chose poems based only on identity.”