Playwriting Alum Mo Holmes '26 Receives the 2026 Yale Drama Prize
Playwright, librettist, and dramaturg Mo Holmes '26 has been awarded the 2026 Yale Drama Prize for her play Amanda. Holmes’s play was selected by Pulitzer- and Tony-winning playwright and current Yale faculty member Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. Past recipients of this prize include playwright and Northwestern faculty member Ariel Stess and playwright Jen Silvers.
Based on Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, long considered a masterpiece, the idea for Amanda came to Holmes after learning about a 1989 all-Black production of The Glass Menagerie featuring Ruby Dee as Williams’s matriarch Amanda. “I was just at the beginning of thinking about what mattered to me as a theatremaker…I was obsessed with this casting,” says Holmes. “I saw my own mother in it, and I saw the history of Black Southern culture and socioeconomic mobility.” In this play, four characters, all named Amanda, move through a series of lessons and examinations of society, school, race, sex, and salvation under the watch of a mother. The play begs the question: What becomes possible during playtime? Can you bite your mother? Become her? Defend her? Touch her? To Holmes, this 1989 production flipped the idea of Williams’s southern belle on its head: “So I started exploring from that idea of my belle, my South, my theatre classic.”
Despite the momentous outcome, Holmes says she was reluctant, at first, to submit her play. “I wasn’t sure the play was ready, or that I was ready for possible rejection.” It was a piece of advice—“‘to get in the slush’ because you never know who might read a play on its journey and become a collaborator or advocate”—from fellow Playwriting alum Sophie McIntosh '25 that inspired her to apply.
As part of the award, Amanda will receive a staged reading at the Yale Schwarzman Center, which is set for October 29, 2026. The creative team of the reading is stacked with recent Columbia alumni, including Brittnay Vi-King '26, who will direct the production; Octavia Washington '26, who will serve as dramaturg; and recent acting alums Anita Parrot '26 and Lola Fadiran '26.
In addition to the planned reading of Amanda, Holmes recently completed a reading of a new play in August at the Flea Theater. In November, Holmes will workshop her opera Desert Bloom with her composer Gillian Rae Perry at The Peabody Institute in Baltimore. Holmes will also take their thesis play, WINGS//WATERMELON to Newport, Rhode Island, for a community reading as part of the Center Aquidneck’s Cato Vernon Freedom Library residency at the Vernon House.
Read more about past recipients of the Yale Drama Prize here.