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When we hear the term “systemic racism,” political correctness doesn’t portray straight, white men as the victim. But Vancouver-based writer Aaron Barry—also known as "Adele Nwankwo," "b. h. fein," "S. A. B. Marcie," and a whole rainbow of DEI-friendly alter-egos—just proved otherwise.

For more than a year, Barry pulled off what he himself calls a “prank on the poetry world,” fooling 30 respected literary journals into publishing what he freely admits was “trash” poetry over 50 times. One piece, under his persona Adele Nwankwo, a “gender-fluid member of the Nigerian diaspora,” reportedly received a nomination for the 2025 Best of the Net Award.

While Barry admits his experiment was partly entertaining, it was mostly about “giving these editors and publishers a bit of realty check,” due to how lost they’ve become in publishing based on identity politics.

“I think a lot of readers are now deterred from the type of material they’re putting out. Book sales and poetry sales, I catalogue it all in my collection, are down considerably and I would say part of that is because of the practices they’ve been using for the last decade or more... I want more people to engage in poetry,” he said.

Some of the poems he got past editors would make any serious literary critic spit out their fair-trade soy latte. Take "Shakespeare’s C#msl*t 🥵😏," a vulgar, emoji-filled jumble with the subtitle “To 🅱️ or not to 🅱️” and lines like: “Do you think 🧐😫 he’ll write a sexy 😽❤️❗ iambic 2️⃣ pentameter 5️⃣ slutliloquy 😮‍💨🤤😜 for me?”

The poem is still published in JAKE: The Anti–Literary Magazine, which originally credited it to "b. h. fein." An editor’s note now lists Barry as the author, explaining that “removing it from the record would be problematic in archiving the mag” and claiming they see “artistic value beyond the cruel joke intended by Mr. Barry… It’s a piece of satire, and JAKE took it as such.”

His most popular persona, Adele Nwankwo, the woke alter-ego behind most of his prank poems, had "After Coming Out: A Wrestling Promo," published, a piece that reads like a fever-dream monologue: “Ooh, I’m so mad I could kiss a woman I don’t even like right now! Yeah, I see all you pretty ladies in the crowd right there… Ric Flair might be broken-down old Magic Mountain, but I’m Raging Bull at Six F(ags. Step right up!”

In May, under the persona Jasper Ceylon, Barry published Echolalia Review: An Anti-Poetry Collection, compiling works from all his invented poets.

But Barry’s pen names weren’t always used for satire. His novel, Femoid, was inspired by real experiences both he and his biracial ex-girlfriend had.

“Despite my rigorous use of pen names for the sake of satire and industry de-stabilization, if you will, Femoid was meant to be a serious work under a pen name created from the fusion of my name with my ex’s,” Barry told Rebel News. “I wrote this book exactly the way I did, rawness and all, because I knew my ex-girlfriend deserved to have her story told—and that if even one person learned that you can live the kind of life she did—that we did—and make it out the other side, whatever it took to get this project out into the world would have been worth it and then some.”

Love him or hate him, Barry’s stunt leaves the literary world with an uncomfortable truth: when identity politics become the gatekeeper, it’s possible for “nonsense” to walk right in as long as it checks the right diversity boxes.

Barry also says he didn’t keep the honorariums from his prank poetry. He provided Rebel News with evidence of his request for some to be donated to an animal shelter and another where gift cards were purchased on his behalf “to support folks in Gaza.”