Artist, Writer, Cultural Theorist
“His migrant tongue shows us why we need to read in the presence of all the languages of the world.”
— Khaled Mattawa
Darrel Alejandro Holnes is the author of Stepmotherland (Notre Dame Press, 2022) & Migrant Psalms (Northwestern Press, 2021). A recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing, his work has been published and translated into Spanish and French. He writes poetry, plays, and films exploring Afro-Panamanian diaspora, migration, and the persistence of joy. He also composes for musical theater and directs for the stage and screen.
Holnes is a performance maker and theater auteur whose work often blends poetry, movement, music, and documentary practices, with several projects written as choreopoems.
Early in his career, his play The Burning Room won the Bela Kiralyfalvi National Student Playwriting at Wichita State University and advanced to regional presentation at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, won the Farrar Memorial Playwriting Prize, and distinction as a finalist for the Hopwood Award in Drama at the University of Michigan, marking a formative moment of national recognition.
His work has received productions or development opportunities at The Brick Theater, Kitchen Theater Company, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, JACK, and the National Black Theatre, among others. He is a member of the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab, the Civilians R&D Group, Page 73’s Interstate 73 Writers Workshop, and PlayPenn’s Playwright Entrepreneur Program (2026), among other professional communities. He is also a member of the inaugural cohort of playwrights-in-residence at The Outrage, A Queer Writers Residency at the North American Cultural Laboratory.
His works Starry Night and Bayano (a musical) received national recognition as finalists for the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference and the Princess Grace Award in Playwriting, along with additional honors and distinctions.
Other works include Black Feminist Video Game, which won an Anthem Award, presented by The Webbys, and was produced by The Civilians for 59E59 Theaters’ Plays in Place, Center Theater Group, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and the Williams Center for the Arts at Lafayette College; Bird of Prey, produced at The Brick Theater as part of its Festival of Lies and later recorded as a narrative podcast for the Parsnip Ship Podcast; and Franklin Ave, which was featured in The Sol Project’s SolFest and the Sin Muros Festival at Stages Houston.
Holnes has been an I Am Soul Playwright in Residence at the National Black Theatre and a Creatives Rebuild New York Artist in Residence, followed by a Muse Artist in Residence, both at the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance. He has received development funding for his theater, choreopoem, and musical theater work from the Brooklyn Arts Council, New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, and the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation, and other foundations.
As a director, he most recently helmed Laughs in Spanish by Alexis Scheer for the Kitchen Theater Company. He is the founder and executive director of Candela Writers, an international organization supporting playwrights and music-theater writers, and the Candela Playwrights Summer Fellowship, a globally focused development program for playwrights, book writers, lyricists, and poets. He is also the recipient of a Catalyst Fellowship from the Dramatists Guild Foundation.
Writing & Directing for the Stage
Holnes is the writer of the short film Marimacha, which premiered at the New York Latino Film Festival in 2023 and has screened at over a dozen festivals internationally, including Out on Film and the Aesthetica Film Festival. The film received Best of the Fest at Pride Film Fest and Best LGBT Short from the Los Angeles Independent Women Film Awards.
He has also developed work for VICE Media, Audible, Gimlet Media, and Climate Spring.
His poem “baby” was adapted into a short film by director Matthew Thompson and premiered at the Bloomsday Film Festival in Dublin, Ireland. His poetry film Familia: The Poem, a collaboration with poet Patrizia Longhitano, was screened at London’s Southbank Centre as part of Latin Spirit.
Writing and Directing for the Screen
Holnes is the author of Stepmotherland (University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), and Migrant Psalms (Northwestern University Press, 2021). He is the co-author of Prime (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014), an Over the Rainbow List selection by the American Library Association, and the co-editor of Happiness, The Delight-Tree: An Anthology of Contemporary International Poetry, published to commemorate the United Nations International Day of Happiness (Society of Writers, 2017).
He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing, the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize from Letras Latinas, the Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize from Northwestern University Press, the C.P. Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, the International Latino Book Award, Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Medal, and additional honors.
Holnes has held writing residencies at the Camargo Foundation, MacDowell, Marble House Project, Rose O'Neill Literary House, Ucross Foundation, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. He is a recent recipient of the Theodore Morrison Fellowship in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and fellowships to CantoMundo, Cave Canem, The Mendocino Coast Writers' Conference, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Writers Conference, among others.
His poems have appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Callaloo, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, Poetry Magazine, and other journals, and have been anthologized twice in Best American Experimental Writing.
Recent recognitions include a Best of the Net nomination from AGNI for “When the Narcos Kidnap Juanfe,” selection of his poem “Transcendental Love Song” by the Poetry Foundation for Poem-of-the-Day, the inclusion of his poem “Cristo Negro de Portobelo” in the Library of America’s Latino Poetry anthology edited by Rigoberto Gonzalez, and the selection of his poem “Black Parade” by the Academy of American Poets for Poem-A-Day. Check out his poetry on audio in the Palabra Archive at the Library of Congress.
Writing for the Page
Holnes studied classical and jazz saxophone at the Instituto Nacional de Música de Panamá, part of Panama’s Instituto Nacional de Cultura (INAC). He has since produced a jazz album and continues to collaborate with musicians in New York, composing and performing jazz, folk, latin, R&B, and popular music across a range of bands and interdisciplinary music projects.
Holnes has worked with a range of musicians; his musical collaborations include “Fancy,” set to song by Grammy nominee, Johan Lenox (Stephen Feigenbaum), and “What I Did for Love,” set to music by Marc LeMay. Most recently, Holnes presented music from his musical Bayano at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater as part of Carnegie Hall’s Nuestros Sonidos festival with support from True Colors Theater and Miss Mason Productions. He will next present music from his show Juneteenth: The Musical as part of Carnegie Hall’s United in Sound: America at 250 Festival, also at Joe’s Pub.
Holnes is featured in the first episode of MTV’s documentary series De la Calle, where he discusses the Afro-Panamanian community’s contributions to reggae and reggaeton.
Making Music & Performance
Teaching and Research
Alongside his work as an artist, Holnes is an educator and artist-scholar whose creative practice is deeply informed by research, pedagogy, and public scholarship. He has taught creative writing across genres—including poetry, playwriting, screenwriting, and spoken word—in the United States and has received institutional and competitive research funding, including support from the National Science Foundation, for work at the intersection of oral history, documentary theater, and GIS mapping, exploring how narrative, place, and memory shape collective life.
He has received research support from the City University of New York, where he serves as an Associate Professor and Executive Director of the Caribbean Research Center, and from New York University, where he is a member of the arts faculty with over a decade of service. He was a CUNY Faculty Fellowship Publications Program Fellow and a recipient of a Faculty Innovation Grant from Medgar Evers College, City University of New York. He has also received multiple faculty development grants from New York University. Prior to the publication of his first books, he received graduate fellowships in poetry at the University of Michigan, including the Cornwell Fellowship and the Zell Postgraduate Award.
Holnes’s research practice centers on ethnographic fieldwork and oral history collection, often with communities whose stories have been historically underrepresented or marginalized. In Berlin, he conducted interviews with German citizens and residents of African descent, research that informed the development of Black Feminist Video Game, a digital performance work produced nationally by The Civilians. In Houston, he was part of a team that built a collection of more than 300 oral histories with survivors of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita—work featured on NPR and presented at the American Folklore Society. More recently, as Principal Investigator on the Central Brooklyn Oral History and Atlas Project, he worked with students to document the impact of COVID-19 on Central Brooklyn residents and presented a choreopoem using student work in partnership with the Center for Brooklyn History at Brooklyn Public Library.
This research-to-performance methodology—collecting stories, analyzing narratives, and translating findings into theatrical and literary works—runs through much of Holnes’s creative output, from plays developed at National Black Theatre to poetry collections exploring migration, displacement, and cultural memory.
Recent civic recognitions include a Tapestry Award for Exceptional Service to the Latine Community from the City University of New York, U.S. Congressional Recognition for excellence in civics and the arts from Representative Judy Chu of California, selection as an honorary Rey Mago at New York City's Annual Three Kings Day Parade presented by Museo del Barrio, and a certificate of recognition from the Comptroller of the City of New York for his outstanding contributions to the community.
“Holnes navigates the fraught politics of national, racial, and sexual identities with grace and wisdom... to locate that precarious but remarkable space an immigrant from Panamá can call home.”
— Rigoberto González