About Us

Let me start by saying I'm mixed race and queer. I grew up against a deeply catholic backdrop (my uncle once sent me the entire collected theological works of C. S. Lewis...but not the Chronicles of Narnia), within a nuanced family background that featured many different kinds of people all coming together around a single table. To this day, the family keeps an open invitation ready for anyone who has the time to come to Sunday dinner at my great grandmother's home, in keeping with one of her dying wishes. It's not a matter of tolerance. It's a matter of love. And though we may all walk different paths in our lives, that dinner table in a hot Florida suburb remains. 

I grew up in a family with diverse attitudes and opinions, as one among a small horde of mixed children ourselves descended from mixed people. One great grandmother was the daughter of a Jewish man and a black woman, another was the daughter of an indigenous woman and a black man. As a direct result, my stories tend to feature a lot of cultural diversity, explorations into nuances between cultures and how they might interact with each other in a fantasy world. Being mixed, after all, is existing in liminal spaces, both inside multiple cultures and adjacent to them. 

Queer voices predominate, as a lack of visibility in the fantasy genre when I was a teen was a driving force in why I started writing novels to begin with. It started with a historical fiction piece I was calling The Order of the Raven...which I abandoned because I found the lack of magic and whimsy in the genre boring. Since then, I've written and published four full length novels, a novella (you can get Gilded Son free by signing up for my fantasy newsletter), and three erotic shorts (You can get the bundle free by signing up for my spicy newsletter). 

In telling these stories, I don't flinch away from the messiness of being, of occupying space. I lean into it frequently, highlighting the very nuances inherent in my upbringing and the environments I grew up in. Maybe I find inspiration in my parents inviting prostitutes who'd just been robbed in for a bite to eat and a listening ear before sending them on their way, or in catching plates in the country neighborhood my grandparents lived in after Christmas dinner concluded; or maybe the source is listening to trees explode in deep sub zero weather during a Central Minnesota winter. It might be hiking in open country at my leisure as a teenager, or traveling cross country on my own new adventure as I moved from Minnesota to southern Alabama, or experiencing the culture of "Fuck You" in Philadelphia when I finally arrived and settled in for the long haul. It might come from enmeshing myself in queer culture, unpacking what was the mask I wore as a closeted man and shedding those things that were no longer useful as I learned to live openly, as myself. Inspiration may even come vicariously from the experiences of friends and family, or oddities witnessed on the street as I navigate life and its various flavors on my way through it. It may even lean into the purely philosophical (still wondering how Santa Claus is running operations at the North Pole when all those cookies should have him in a diabetic coma). 

But at their cores, the stories I tell call back to that concept of living in liminal spaces, existing in nuance, in-between. You'll find, whether I'm writing as D. A. Holley or Holden Cummings, that the stories are messy, nuanced, and unapologetic about being what they are. If life is messy, why should the stories we read be clean? Human beings are not simple creatures. In my writing, I seek to explore us as our messy, chaotic selves, and explore that nuance in great detail.