Darrel Alejandro Holnes (born in Panama City, Panama) is a poet, playwright, and professor whose bilingual work draws on Afro-Panamanian heritage, performance, and religious tradition to explore displacement, desire, and identity. He studied at the University of Houston and holds degrees from Fordham and the University of Michigan. His debut collection Stepmotherland (Notre Dame Press, 2022) won the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry. He is an assistant professor at the City University of New York. He has been a fellow of CantoMundo and received grants from the Bronx Council on the Arts.