“Straight white author’s career finally takes off after he tells woke publishers he’s gender queer Nigerian”, reports the Daily Mail.

The artist formerly and now once again known as Aaron Barry is truly a bard for our times:

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.

A 2024 interview with b.h. fein appears in a magazine called “The Cry Lounge” here:

hi there, reader! i’m b. h. fein (they/them or it’s/complicated)~~! i write lots of stuff (mostly in lowercase), but my gluten-free bread and vegan butter is free verse poetry. i haven’t been sending my stuff out for too too long, but i feel like i recently cracked the code as to what i can offer the poetry world

They wasn’t wrong there.

-*-

I was going to add a “Related Post” link to my Samizdata post about Rahila Khan, whose short stories about the lives of Asian girls and women in a depressed English town were much admired in the literary world of the late 1980s until she turned out to be the Rev. Toby Forward, an Anglican vicar. Virago, the publisher, had all its unsold copies of Down the Road, Worlds Away pulped. The post I thought I remembered writing seems to have metaphorically shared their fate.

“Voting age to be lowered to 16 in UK by next general election”, the Guardian reports.

No, this does not mean you can leave school. You are too young and irresponsible to make such a big decision.