The Regeneración Lab is honored to be in collaboration with filmmaker and producer Naimah Holmes to preserve the personal archive of her mother, revolutionary Black feminist poet and author Safiya Henderson Holmes.

About Safiya Henderson Holmes

Safiya Henderson Holmes (1950-2001) was born and raised in the Bronx. She later lived in the iconic Harlem apartment complex 409 Edgecombe where she became an important Black Arts Movement poet and radical Black liberation and feminist activist. Holmes was known as much for her writing and activism as she was for her practice as a therapist and midwife, carving a unique holistic praxis of art, activism and healing.

Safiya was a contemporary of poets such as Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Nikki Giovani, Ntozake Shange, and Gil Scott Heron. Her archive includes rare and significant works and ephemera related both to the groundbreaking literary circles she engaged as well as her activism in black feminist and liberational causes. Her poetry often addressed activist causes, such as prison abolition, political prisoner advocacy, and everyday Black life in New York. She also was known for exploring the artistry and complexity of Black women’s lives in her poetry. Her later work, “C’ing Colors,” chronicles her battle with cancer through brief stanzas articulated through the different colors of her experience with illness. Her performances and readings were known for their complexity and multi-form structure, experimentally blending poetry, dance, and music.

She was a member of many activist organizations and causes, including Art Against Apartheid, Poets and Writers, the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, and MADRE.

Safiya held a Bachelor of Arts degree from New York University and an MFA from City College. She taught creative writing at Syracuse University, University Heights High School, Marymount College, Touro College, the New School for Social Research, College of New Rochelle, and Sarah Lawrence College. She was also a healer working through the modalities of physical therapy, midwifery, and natural birth support for women of color. Throughout her career, Safiya won numerous awards including the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Fannie Lou Hamer Achievement Award from City University of New York, two Goodman City College Awards, a MacDowell Fellowship, a Northstar Grant, a New York CAPS Poetry Fellowship, and a New York Foundation of the Arts fellowship.

Archive Project

In 2025, the Regeneración Lab worked with Holmes’ family to save the Safiya Henderson Holmes archive from storage auction. We are now looking for funders to support the long-term goals of the Holmes family to preserve these critically important works and to ensure that the family will retain copyright protections over the materials, which includes Safiya’s out of print publications, several remarkable unpublished manuscripts, and extremely rare Black Arts movement and activist memorabilia and ephemera. The family is excited to see this work receive proper archival care and to publish Safiya’s poetry, plays, and fiction in order to bring her contributions to new audiences and scholarly attention.

Project Timeline

Safiya Henderson Holmes Bibliography of Published Works

• Henderson-Holmes, Safiya. “Rituals of Spring: (For the 78th Anniversary of the Shirtwaist Factory Fire).” Women’s Studies Quarterly 23, no. 1/2 (1995): 173–77. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40004010.
• Henderson-Holmes, Safiya. “Failure of an Invention.” Unsettling America. Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan. New York: Penguin Books. 1994. 60. Print.
• Henderson-Holmes, Safiya. Daily Bread. 1994.
• Henderson-Holmes, Safiya. Madness and a Bit of Hope. 1990.
• Goldner, Ellen J., and Safiya Henderson-Holmes, eds. Racing and (e) racing Language: Living with the Color of Our Words. Syracuse University Press, 2001.
• Henderson-Holmes, Safiya. “Wideman, John Edgar. Breaking ice: An anthology of contemporary African-American fiction. Penguin, 1990.
• Henderson-Holmes, Safiya. “”C” ing in colors: blue” and “fugitive slaves”. Spirit & Flame: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. Ed. Keith Gilyard. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1997. xxii+304 pp.
• Henderson-Holmes, Safiya. “Some Excerpts from a Poem-Cycle Entitled ‘’C’ing in Colors.’” The Black Scholar 29, no. 2/3 (1999): 15–17. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41058679.

Resources About Safiya Henderson Holmes

Internet Resources

• “A Soulful poet of Harlem: Safiya Henderson Holmes” by Herb Boyd. New Amsterdam News. December 10, 2015.
  https://amsterdamnews.com/news/2015/12/10/soulful-poet-harlem-safiya-henderson-holmes/
• MacDowell Fellowship Acknowledgments https://www.macdowell.org/artists/safiya-henderson-holmes
• Safiya Henderson Holmes on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safiya_Henderson-Holmes
• “Writer to speak in city Monday,” The Oklahoman. 1988. https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/1988/02/14/writer-to-speak-in-city-monday/62661960007/
• Safiya Henderson Holmes on Kiddle https://kids.kiddle.co/Safiya_Henderson-Holmes
• Mention in the Poets in Bars, April-May 1989, series history. https://creativetime.org/programs/archive/1989/poets/poets.htm
• Mention on the famous residents of 409 Edgecombe in Harlem https://wwash.akilaworksongs.com/409-edgecombe/
  And here https://whilewearestillhere.org/about-us
• Mention in Calloway, Catherine. “Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s.” American Literary Scholarship 2001 (2001): 343-366. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/45447.
• Nathalie Handal. “The City and the Writer: In New York City with Kathy Engel” Words without borders: the home for international literature. October 7, 2019 https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2019-10/the-city-and-the-writer-in-new-york-city-with-kathy-engel-nathalie-handal/
• Jacqueline Johnson. Interview for Brooklyn Poets. https://brooklynpoets.org/community/poet/jacqueline-johnson

Scholarly References and Research

• Coles, Nicholas. “American working-class literature.” What We Hold in Common: An Introduction to Working-class Studies (2001): 315.
• Doll, Mary Aswell, Delese Wear, and Martha L. Whitaker. Triple takes on curricular worlds. State University of New York Press, 2012.
• Kovacik, Karen. “Words of Fire for Our Generation: Contemporary Working-Class Poets on the Triangle Fire.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 26, no. 1/2 (1998): 137-158.
• Martone, Michael. Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft and the Craft of Art. University of Georgia Press, 2010.
• Medina, Tony, and Louis Reyes Rivera, eds. Bum rush the page: A def poetry jam. Crown, 2009.
• Mish, Jeanetta Calhoun. “To Be Of Use’: Contemporary American Women’s Poetry of Work and Workers.” (2009).
• Mitchell, Shamika Ann. “Safiya Henderson Holmes,” Encyclopedia of African American women writers. Ed. Yolanda Williams Page. Westport, CT: Greenwood. (2007): 266-267.
• Stepakoff, Susan Shanee. “Poetry therapy principles and practices for raising awareness of racism.” The Arts in psychotherapy 24, no. 3 (1997): 261-274.
• Tokarczyk, Michelle M. “Toward Imagined Solidarity in the Working-Class Epic: Chris Llewellyn’s Fragments from the Fire and Diane Gilliam Fisher’s Kettle Bottom.” Women’s Studies 43, no. 7 (2014): 865-891.
• Zandy, Janet Ballotta. Working-class Bildung class consciousness and praxis. State University of New York at Buffalo, 1996.