Harmony Holiday

Around October 7, 2023, I lost faith in any previous misconceptions I had that artist statements and manifestos weren't opportunistic declarations of solidarity that ultimately amount to nothing more than grief tourism. At the same time, if we don't use language to refuse and reimagine, we are using silence as consent. 

I, like Sun Ra, believe that poetry is “the ultimate in things,” a sacred form that teaches other forms how to be more sacred, while at the same time giving us the glorified profanity we see in advertisements, branding, meme and GIF culture, and industry planting as we navigate the infinite scroll. Poetry’s highest function now is akin to that of jazz when it was in its prime—to set a standard of integrity and beauty that cannot be standardized. 

And so, as much as I am always preoccupied with writing it, I am also concerned with living it, embodying it, and letting that writing move from the page to wherever it desires to actualize as true meaning. In the tradition of the important adage about words themselves: don't ask its meaning, ask its use.

Harmony Holiday is a poet whose work moves across disciplines including film, dance, and archives of Black culture. She often writes about Black performance—its codes, trappings, freedoms, and institutional capture or lack thereof. Holiday names Amiri Baraka, Henry Dumas, Margo Jefferson, Fred Moten, and Nettie Jones as elective affinities. 

Holiday’s fifth book, Maafa (Fence Books, 2022), an epic poem about reparations and the female body, is composed of lyric essays, prose poems, verse, and images. “Maafa” is both the Kiswahili word for “great disaster” or “great tragedy”—referencing the atrocities of the African Holocaust—and the name of the work’s protagonist, a young girl in pursuit of freedom from grief and trauma. Her meditation on James Baldwin on film, “For Those Who Would Be Real: James Baldwin’s testimony in images,” was published in Harper’s Magazine in 2025. Other collections by Holiday include A Jazz Funeral for Uncle Tom (Birds, LLC, 2019), which won a 2020 California Book Award; Hollywood Forever (Fence Books, 2017); Go Find Your Father/A Famous Blues (Ricochet Editions, 2014); ​​and Negro League Baseball (Fence Books, 2011). 

Her 2024 exhibition BLACK BACKSTAGE at The Kitchen, New York, NY, builds upon themes present in Maafa, particularly its exploration of the sounds and archetypes that emerge from the ruins of displacement and genocide. The exhibition encompassed short film, prints, sculpture, and sound installation, and was activated by live performances and public conversations. BLACK BACKSTAGE was inspired by the ways Black music is brought to the stage, radio, and album formats as both necessity and commodity. Holiday will present the solo exhibition Spectacular Brooding at REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA in spring 2026. 

Holiday is the recipient of the Grace Dudley Prize for Arts Writing from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation (2024), the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Prize in Arts Journalism (2023), two Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grants (2018, 2012), and the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship (2013).

She is a staff writer at 4Columns, The Los Angeles Times, and Bookforum, and curator and archivist at 2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles, CA. 

Holiday holds an M.F.A. from Columbia University and a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley.