Yale Drama Series: AMANDA (reading)

Playwright, librettist and dramaturg Mo Holmes will receive the 2026 Yale Drama Series Prize for her play, AMANDA. The work was selected by Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning playwright and Yale faculty member Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, in his second year judging the competition.

On Thursday, October 29, Holmes will be honored at Yale Schwarzman Center with a staged reading of AMANDA and the conferral of the David Charles Horn Award, which provides the winning playwright a $10,000 cash prize. The play will also be published by Yale University Press, which collaborates with the David Charles Horn Foundation and Yale Schwarzman Center to administer the Prize and bring each year’s winning play to performance and print.

Holmes joins eighteen playwrights recognized over the twenty-year history of the Yale Drama Series, which concludes with the 2026 award.

AMANDA, inspired by Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, is a psychosocial doll and puppet horror-fantasy charting the violence of becoming an upwardly mobile Southern Black girl. Set in a childish, anachronistic conception of Black D.C. across “plantation-times and now-times, and all the in-between.”

In the play, four characters, all named Amanda, move through a series of lessons on society, school, race and sex, salvation, secrets and more, under the watch of Mother. AMANDA explores what becomes possible during playtime: What if you could bite your Mother? Be her? Defend her? Touch her?