6 Contemporary Panamanian Authors You Should Know


Carlos Wynter Melo was born in Panama City in 1971. He has authored numerous works, including El escapista y otras reapariciones (2007), Nostalgia de escuchar tu risa loca (2013), Ojos para ver una invasión (2015), Mujeres que desaparecen (2016), and the essay collection Panamá: El dique, el agua y los papeles (2017). His work was been featured in the magazine Words Without Borders, as well as in the anthology The Future Is Not Ours: New Latin American Fiction (2012), translated by Janet Hendrickson. His book Las impuras (2015) was a finalist for the Association of Caribbean Writers Prize in 2015.

Veronica Chambers is a novelist, essayist, and journalist. Born in Panama and raised in Brooklyn, Chambers is the author of Mama’s Girl (1996), The Go-Between (2017), and the picture book biography Shirley Chisholm Is a Verb (2020), illustrated by Rachelle Baker, among other works. She has also co-authored several memoirs, including chef Marcus Samuelsson’s award-winning book Yes, Chef (2012) and journalist Robin Roberts’s best-selling Everybody’s Got Something (2014). The recipient of awards such as the Hodder Fellowship for emerging novelists at Princeton University and the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University, Chambers is the editor for Narrative Projects at The New York Times.

Darrel Alejandro Holnes is an Afro-Panamanian American writer, performer, and educator. A CantoMundo fellow, Holnes is the recipient of numerous accolades, including the C. P. Cavafy Poetry Prize from Poetry International, the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize from Letras Latinas, and the Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize from Northwestern University Press. His work has appeared in publications such as the American Poetry Review, Callaloo, and Best American Experimental Writing, among others. Holnes currently works as an assistant professor at Medgar Evers College, a senior college of the City University of New York (CUNY), and his poetry collections Stepmotherland and Migrant Psalms are forthcoming in 2021.

Yvette Modestin is a writer and activist from Colón, Panama. Her work has appeared in The Afro Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the US (2010), Antología de Poesía Colonense (2012), Rapsodia Antillana (2013), Afro-Latin@s in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas (2016), and elsewhere. Modestin is the Founder/Executive Director of Encuentro Diaspora Afro in Boston, MA, and the Diaspora Coordinator of the Red de Mujeres Afrolatinoamericanas, Afrocaribeñas y de la Diaspora (RMAAD), an international network of Afro–Latin American women. Her poetry collection Nubian Butterfly: The Transformation of a Soulful Heart was published in 2019.

Cristina Henríquez is a writer of Panamanian descent. She is the author of Come Together, Fall Apart: A Novella and Stories (2006), The World in Half (2009), and the novel The Book of Unknown Americans (2014), which was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly, The Wall Street Journal, and Ploughshares. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Henríquez is a recipient of the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation Award. She lives in Illinois.

Jenise Miller is a Pushcart-nominated poet and urban planner from Los Angeles. The inaugural DSTL Arts Poet/Artist-in-Residence, Miller is a Voices of Our Nations Arts (VONA) alumna whose first poetry collection, The Blvd, was published in 2020. Her writing has also been featured in The Acentos Review, Dryland Literary Journal, Cultural Weekly, PANK Magazine, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Black Studies and Sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a master’s degree in Urban Planning from the University of California, Los Angeles. She lives in Compton with her family.
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2/14/2021
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