The Writer
For a lot of Panamanians and Panamanian-Americans, family means everything. I am one of those Panamanian-Americans. I come from a huge, tight-knit, multilingual family as my father is one of nine siblings. As the youngest cousin on both sides, I had to pay close attention to complicated family dynamics to figure out where I fit in. This close attention to the complexity of tight interpersonal relationships inspired me to write about family today. I first started writing about family in poetry and song, and then turned to playwriting and screenwriting. I believe that every human being craves connection, and family is the first community that satisfies (or doesn’t satisfy) that desire.
I’ve been a writer as long as I’ve been breathing, but I’ve also had other careers. I worked as a consultant at the United Nations on various special events that ranged from honoring the life and work of literary giant Chinua Achebe to celebrating the International Day of Happiness. I also worked as a researcher who collected oral histories from Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita survivors in Houston and New Orleans for the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center. And I did a turn as a tastemaker in the New York nightlife scene, all before becoming a college professor at NYU at 26 years old. I’ve now taught playwriting there for seven years and counting with a specialty in research-based playwriting supported by my earlier work in ethnography/anthropology and my own research-based plays. I also teach at a CUNY college where I’m a tenure-track Assistant Professor, and I’m an affiliate faculty member of the CUNY Grad Center where I teach ethnographic research methods.
I’m an avid traveler and maintain a travel Instagram that documents where I’ve been. Although it’s hard to fit photos from trips to 67 countries over the years onto one social media account, I offer a selection to my humble number of followers on social media.
I love writing and started to identify as a writer in high school when I wrote a commemorative poem about 9/11, which I was asked to read at a school assembly; it was the first time my writing moved hundreds of people to tears. I started my professional writing career when I moved to the US and came of age as a college student. My first literary loves were poetry and songwriting, but I’ve always also been drawn to narrative, typically preferring poems and songs that told stories. So now I think of myself first and foremost as a storyteller.
Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan
Migrant Psalms
Advanced Praise: "Darrel Alejandro Holnes captures beautifully the deep investment in hope (and in the divine) that immigrants must make, and the deeper investment in themselves that fuels their hope. And with vibrant images, compelling narratives, and witty and affective turns of phrase, he sings the ambivalence of arrival and the shifting blues of self-making. Migrant Psalms is a wise and soulful debut, a gem of a book."
—Khaled Mattawa, author of Fugitive Atlas: Poems
"['OTM'] transcends the list poem so far as to create its own unique form. This is the form of all of Darrel Alejandro Holnes’s work. The conclusion of his poem 'Poder' describes and defines this original form: 'moving us farther and farther / away from the world being just rhetoric, / into the structure of its design . . . / knowing this too is poetry.' Reader, this is poetry."
—Ed Roberson, from the introduction
From the Publisher: Migrant Psalms prays for a way to make sense of immigration to the United States—now that we realize the American Dream was always an impossible one. Both reverent and daring, this verse interrogates religion, race, class, family, and sexuality. Written as a call to action, the collection pulls together prayer, popular culture, and technology to tell a twenty-first-century migrant story.
Migrant Psalms gives us a rare look inside a Panamanian experience of migration, describing the harsh realities of mothers, children, and teens who entered the United States—or tried to do so. Holnes’s poems find the universal through specificity; their exploration of expatriation, assimilation, and naturalization transcends the author’s personal experience to speak to what it means to be “other” anywhere.
The collection begins with “Kyrie,” a coming-to-America chronicle that spans three years in Texas, modeled after the liturgical Christian prayer Kyrie Eleison (Lord, have mercy). Other poems experiment with macaronic language and form to parallel shifts in the speaker’s status from immigrant to citizen, ending with “The 21st Century Poem,” which probes what’s “real” in today’s New York City. Through the speaker’s quest to become an American, this collection asks: Who are we becoming as individuals, as a society, as a nation, as a world? And is faith enough to enact change? Or is it just the first step?
Stepmotherland
Advanced Praise: "From narrative poems that sing, to lyrics that make of rhythm a spell, to moving portraits, to poems that go across borders smashing those borders, Stepmotherland is a splendid debut; I love its rhapsodic, incantatory music."
―Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
"Stepmotherland is a procession of lines (lives), with one song facing forward and another facing back. It is a lyrical document that attends to the histories of touch out of which Holnes emerges, and so, in a language both lithe and live, the work teems with expanse and collapse, terror, tenderness, pleasure."
―Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria
"In Stepmotherland, Darrel Alejandro Holnes teaches us the complications of love, whether it comes in the form of romantic passion or unrequited patriotism. But this is also a view of the many permutations of manhood, all of its beauty and even its bruises―and sometimes under the makeup, we find both."
―A. Van Jordan, author of The Cineaste
"Stepmotherland is the brilliant and vertiginous movement of a soul from the state of innocence to experience and a remarkable and groundbreaking collection. No one who reads these stunning poems is likely to remain unmoved or unchanged by them."
―Lorna Goodison, author of Supplying Salt and Light and Poet Laureate of Jamaica
“In Stepmotherland, Darrel Holnes moves from bilingual lines to script-like dialogue to gorgeous subversions of form in his search for a language that can properly articulate what home is. . . . This book is a kind of coming of age into brilliance.”
―Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition and winner of the Pulitzer Prize
“Stepmotherland is a balm. The lyrics to a melody that has always played in our heads. Holnes gives us the heartbreaking and healing song. A stunning debut.”
―Jacqueline Woodson, author of Brown Girl Dreaming and winner of the National Book Award
“Darrel Alejandro Holnes navigates the fraught politics of national, racial, and sexual identities with grace and wisdom beyond his years in order to locate that precarious but remarkable space that a queer Afro/Black-Latino immigrant from Panamá can call home. . . . What a unique, multivalent, and incredibly moving debut.”
―Rigoberto González, winner of the Lambda Literary Award and author of The Book of Ruin
From the Publisher: Stepmotherland is a tour-de-force debut about coming of age, coming out, and coming to America. Holnes’ poems chronicle and question identity, family, and allegiance. This Central American love song is in constant motion as it takes us on a lyrical and sometimes narrative journey from Panama to the USA and beyond, as he searches for home. These poems take the reader on a wild ride through the most pressing political issues of our time and the most intimate and transformative personal experiences of Holnes’s life. Darrel Alejandro Holnes was born in Panama and provides a unique voice as an immigrant, queer, Afro/Black-Latinx poet as he engages with identity, religion, and popular culture. This book brings together all of Holnes's experiences and identities into a single, explosive, vibrant collection.
Poems and Press
Check out my poems at the links below…
Read about my plays at the links below..
Check out this podcast at the links below…