The Writer
Darrel Alejandro Holnes is a writer whose poetry, plays, and essays explore the afterlives of colonialism and the making of Afro-Latino identity across the Americas.
For Panamanians and Panamanian-Americans like Holnes, family means everything. As the youngest cousin in a huge, tight-knit, multilingual family—his father is one of nine siblings—he learned early to pay close attention to complicated dynamics to figure out where he fit in. That attention to the complexity of intimate relationships became the engine of his writing. He first explored family in poetry and song, then turned to playwriting and screenwriting. Across all forms, his work returns to the ways we seek connection—and to family as the first community that satisfies, or fails to satisfy, that desire.
Holnes believes art holds a mirror up to society—whether convex, funhouse, or naturalistic—and that the reflection helps us understand ourselves well enough to be of service to each other and the planet. He writes across genres not out of restlessness but out of fidelity to the idea: he tries to find the form that best communicates it, learning new forms when necessary to honor the gift of inspiration. His current obsessions circle around how humanity might find harmony with nature rather than abandoning a damaged planet, and how we might stop accepting conflict as inevitable and instead choose to evolve.
For Holnes, there is no healing without trauma, and no survival without growing pains. But he insists that joy is not a luxury—it is a basic human right, and often the way through. His work carries that conviction.
As an educator, Holnes wants students to leave his classroom with a critical awareness that all knowledge has been curated for them by someone else—and a drive to curate knowledge for themselves and hold institutions accountable. He first understood the power of his own writing in high school, when a commemorative poem about 9/11 moved a school assembly to tears. He began his professional career after immigrating to the United States, coming of age as a college student in Texas and later Michigan. Before becoming a professor at 26, he worked as a consultant at the United Nations on special events including honoring the life and legacy of Chinua Achebe and celebrating the International Day of Happiness.
Holnes is now Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Medgar Evers College, CUNY, and Executive Director of the Caribbean Research Center. He has taught at NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study for over a decade, with a specialty in research-based playwriting supported by his background in ethnography.
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…