Darrel Alejandro Holnes is a poet, playwright, and researcher from Panama City, Panama, and the former Panama Canal Zone. His plays have won or been finalists for various awards and honors including the Princess Grace Award in Playwriting, Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference, WSU’s Best New Play, Farrar Prize in Playwriting, and the Hopwood Award in Drama at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor. He’s been awarded various grants including a Kitchen Theater Company New Play Development Grant, Arch & Bruce Brown Foundation Production Grant, and the Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant in Literature. His plays have been presented as part of the Kennedy Center for the Arts College Theater Festival (THE BURNING ROOM), NOW African Playwrights Festival (SHELL SHOCK), Brick Theater's Festival of Lies (BIRD OF PRAY), Keep Soul Alive! at the National Black Theater (TRIGGER), and elsewhere nationwide. He is a MacDowell fellow in playwriting and a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab, Page 73’s Interstate 73 Writers’ Group, the Musical Theater Factory’s POC Roundtable, and the Stillwater Writers Workshop. His play NATIVITY was selected for the 50PP List of top unproduced plays by Latinx playwrights in 2018. His play STARRY NIGHT was a 2018 finalist for the O'Neill's National Playwrights Conference and a 2019 finalist for the Princess Grace Award in Playwriting. His play FRANKLIN AVE was selected for the 2019 SolFest: A Latinx Theater Festival presented by The Sol Project and Pregones Theater/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, and an excerpt of his play MIMADO was read at Primary Stages as part of their Infinite Stories series presented by NYC Latinx Playwrights.