Born in Waterloo, Iowa, poet and choreographer Harmony Holiday is the daughter of Northern Soul singer/songwriter Jimmy Holiday. Her father died when she was five, and she and her mother moved to Los Angeles. Holiday was educated at the University of California at Berkeley and Columbia University. Her debut collection of poems, Negro League Baseball (2011), won the Fence Books Motherwell Prize.
 
Holiday’s work tests the limits of language and memory, pushing at the elasticity of both poems and prose. As a reviewer for Publishers Weekly noted of Negro League Baseball, “Chaotic and mesmerizing, with sex, violence, music, history and semantics moving at breakneck speed, Holiday's debut is a rare event: in prose poems and in isolated lines, her long unruly sentences take in a mother's funeral, a tumultuous love affair, Mississippi family roots, Northern branches, and the partly improvised, often confrontational styles of advanced African-American music from be-bop and post-bop to hip-hop and whatever lies beyond.” Holiday lives in New York City.