DR. MING LAUREN HOLDEN is the author of Refuge, winner of the inaugural Kore Press Memoir Award, which was judged by Lidia Yuknavitch. Dr. Holden is also the winner of the Glimmer Train Family Matters Fiction Prize; the Chattahoochee Review’s Lamar York Nonfiction Prize; and the Bellingham Review’s 49th parallel Poetry Award. Dr. Holden has worked in the humanitarian aid sector, most often with refugees, in Kenya, Syria, Ukraine, Turkey, Mongolia, Bolivia, Suriname, China, Russia, Moldova, Mexico, Canada, Germany, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica.

Dr. Holden also won the USAID worldwide essay contest for inclusion in the Frontiers in Development book, and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her essay a nod in the introduction! Dr. Holden was subsequently invited by the United States Embassy to Suriname on a diplomatic engagement under the U.S. Speakers Program to present on creative writing and theater as tools for empowerment for Women's History Month. (Here’s the press release.)

Dr. Holden earned her BA in Literary Arts with Honors from Brown University shortly before decamping to Mongolia for a year as a Henry Luce Scholar, where she served the Mongolian Writers Union for a year as their first-ever International Relations Advisor. There in Ulaanbaatar, Dr. Holden advocated successfully both for the eventual establishment of a Mongolian PEN Center; and for the safe passage of Tumenulzei Bayunmend, an exiled Chinese writer and his family at the local UNHCR, including securing him a $10,000 Human Rights Watch Hellman-Hammett grant for endangered writers.

That’s pretty much how Dr. Holden fell into refugee advocacy, and over 15 years later, she has not stopped. Dr. Holden returned to Mongolia to work for The Asia Foundation and presented on behalf of the exiled writer in Turkey at the inaugural Writers and Literary Translators International Congress, where she was the youngest presenter.

Dr. Holden is also the author of a limited fundraising run of a nonfiction novella entitled The Survival Girls, which was released through Wolfram Productions and tells the story of her work founding a self-sustaining women’s theater group for Congolese refugees in a Nairobi slum. She also self-published The Syria Dispatches, a slim volume of essays about her summer spent working in Syria and Turkey with Syrian refugees in 2013.

Dr. Holden’s poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, journalism, interviews, photography, and literary translations have appeared in The Best American Poetry Blog, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Huffington Post, The Rumpus, and many others. While an undergraduate, she co-founded and served as Editor-in-Chief of the Brown Literary Review.

Dr. Holden earned her MFA in Creative Writing at Indiana University, where she was the first-ever MFA candidate to be awarded the Herman B Wells Fellowship for “leadership abilities, character, social consciousness, and generosity of spirit." (Here’s the press release). She was also the recipient of a Woon-Joon Yoon Memorial Fellowship “for students who have exemplified tolerance and understanding across racial and religious lines through service, personal commitment, academic achievement and future potential."

After a BA from an Ivy and an MFA from a Big Ten, Dr. Holden returned home to the west coast, earning her PhD in Performance Studies from UCSB as a UC Regents Special Fellow and a member of the pilot group of Graduate Affiliate Fellows at the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.

While at UCSB, she served as Instructor of Record for both “The Odyssey Project” - a theater workshop serving incarcerated youth in their place of detainment; and “Playsia” - a theater workshop serving students from marginalized communities. (She also directed both concomitant public theater shows.)

Dr. Holden’s focus as a teacher, a human,, an artist, and a scholar, inspired by the Survival Girls, is on trauma recovery. Her dissertation committee was, uniquely, made up of affiliate faculty from Black Studies (Dr. Stephanie Batiste, Chair), History (Dr. Paul Spickard), and Queer/Feminist Studies (Dr. Jennifer Tyburzcy). The first draft of her dissertation chapter about her ongoing thirteen-year history project with Chumash native Tautahcho Muhuawit was a finalist for the Documentary Essay Prize at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies.

Dr. Holden was bitten by the theater bug when she worked with the Survival Girls in 2011. She has acted (in person and lately over zoom) in productions by Plaza Playhouse, Dogstar Theater, Dijo Productions, Monkey With A Hat On, and the Nutz-N-Boltz Theater Company, performing multiple lead roles for each. She also starred in the film short Flammestra (directed by Anna South) and performed two guest roles on the television show Pine Valley Medical (directed By Ben Ferguson). She modeled the fall 2019 line of clothing for Utopia Santa Fe and did the voice work for Arrogant Wizard LLC’s newest video game demo.

Dr. Holden has worked as a freelance consultant in the creative, literary, pedagogical, humanitarian, and editorial spaces for several years. She served Trócaire, an international aid organization, on short-term remote contracts in 2016 (Ebola outbreak response evaluation report); in 2018 (gender-based-violence legislation impact evaluation report); and 2020 (European Union-funded programming for emergency response capacity-building evaluation report). She often works privately to edit the written work of governmental employees. She has led trauma recovery workshops on the fly with Congolese refugees in Kenya (for the UNHCR) and Ukrainian refugees in Moldova (for the Sunshine House). She recently collaborated for several months with the legendary Wilson Smith III, the first Black designer at Nike, on a book about his amazing journey creating some of the most iconic looks in sports history.

Dr. Holden recently finished a refugee advocacy trip to Ukraine, Berlin, and Moldova; her writing about the Ukrainians she met there is up at the Ukraine Stories collective and at the Global Center for Advanced Studies Magazine. Dr. Holden’s most recent interview was with Kristina Marie Darling, and it’s featured alongside an extract of her work-in-progress over at Tupelo Quarterly.

If you’d like to get to know Dr. Holden better, she was recently interviewed by the Global Center for Advanced Studies by its founder, Dr. Creston Davis; and by Michael Hickins on But I Digress: How Writers Make It Work. Her art portfolio features an ongoing project she started during lockdown: collaging a tarot card deck from her parents’ magazines that centers women and BIPOC in a modern interpretation of Tarot archetypes.

Dr. Holden’s got profiles in all the usual places: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.