As an editor, Villa first published "Philippine Short Stories: Best 25 Short Stories of 1928" in 1929, an anthology of Filipino short stories written in English literature English that were mostly published in the literary magazine Philippine Free Press for that year. It is the second anthology to have been published in the Philippines, after "Philippine Love Stories" by editor Paz Márquez-Benítez in 1927. His first collection of short stories that he had written were published under the title "Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others" in 1933; while in 1939, Villa published "Many Voices", his first collection poems, followed by "Poems by Doveglion" in 1941. Other collections of poems include "Have Come, Am Here" (1942) and "Volume Two" (1949; the year he edited "The Doveglion Book of Philippine Poetry in English from 1910"). Three years later, he released a follow-up for "The Portable Villa" entitled "The Essential Villa." In 1958 he brought out "Selected Poems and New," in which he retained "only those poems that I can still care about" from "Have Come, Am Here" and "Volume Two". There was, in addition, a section of early poems, "comprising what I deem to be the best of the work done in my early youth," published for the first time. With this volume "Villa abandoned poetry" (Cowen). Villa, however, went under "self-exile" after the 1960s, even though he was nominated for several major literary awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. This was perhaps because of oppositions between his formalism (literature) formalist style and the advocates of proletarian literature, who misjudged him as a petty bourgeois. Villa only "resurfaced" in 1993 with an anthology entitled "Charlie Chan Is Dead", which was edited by Jessica Hagedorn.