The through-line: the most undervalued asset people of color hold is authorship of their own story, and the extraction of narratives without authorship is a live economic problem, not just a moral one. The inheritance that matters most is control of your own story.
As a part of this series, we had the pleasure to interview Corey W. Holmes.
Dr. Corey W. Holmes is a foreign affairs expert, educator, author, and father who has served in both the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government. He holds a Ph.D. in African Studies from Howard University, an MBA, and a bachelor’s degree from Clark Atlanta University, and has taught as an adjunct professor at Howard University and NYU. A Fulbright and Boren alumnus, Dr. Holmes brings extensive international experience to his work and has contributed to academic and global publications. Originally from Detroit, he now lives in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, with his family. Outside of his professional work, he is passionate about golf, fine spirits, and cigars, interests he views as opportunities to build relationships, reflect, and create meaningful connections.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
I spent almost two decades in foreign affairs, specifically U.S. foreign affairs. I worked across sub-Saharan Africa primarily, but also the Caribbean and parts of the Middle East, serving along the way as Acting Staff Director on the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa. That is about as close to the machinery as you can get. You write the memo and the press release, you brief the member, you shape the hearing.
And then one day you go looking for the memo, and it is gone. Not lost — just absorbed. It did its job for seventy-two hours and then the news cycle moved.
The turn had actually come earlier, in 2009, before my D.C. journey began. It simply took the Capitol Hill years for me to understand what I had already seen.
I was in Johannesburg, working for an NGO and later as a consultant with the South African Chamber of Commerce and Industry. I was doing what researchers do — coding responses, tracking variables. But the young people I sat with were not giving me data. They were giving me testimony. They were telling me stories with structure and stakes and grief in them, and I understood that this was their life, not an input for an aid report.
I had the causation backwards. The data reports were necessary. The story was what actually moved people. So I built a company around the proposition that curating stories skillfully is not a softer version of the work — it is the work. Holmes Holdings exists in part because of a decade of conversations across rural and urban Africa, and with other communities worldwide whose accounts deserved better than a footnote.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company or organization?
This is not a story about a deal or a launch, which is exactly why it has stayed with me.
Earlier this year my family and I were at the beach at Casa de Campo. Three young women approached and asked if I would take a survey for them. I said of course — I will always stop for a student with a clipboard. I asked where they went to school. NYU.
I told them I had taught there. Professor Holmes.
The recognition was immediate. They knew the name — not because they had sat in my classroom, but because friends of theirs had. My name had traveled through a network of students I have never met, to a beach in the Dominican Republic, years after the fact. My wife was astonished. I was too, though I made an effort to look composed about it and I am fairly certain I failed.
Here is why I count that as the most interesting thing that has happened since I started this company. Holmes Holdings rests on a single proposition: what you transmit outlives the transaction. A book, a chapter, a lecture — the value is not in the moment of delivery. It is in what keeps moving afterward, without you, in rooms you will never enter. I make that argument in the abstract constantly. That afternoon I watched it happen in real time, in a form I could not have engineered or bought.
It also clarified what the work is actually for. I have written monographs and memoirs and I intend to keep writing them. But the most durable thing I do is sit with a young person and help them find their next best move. Everything else is a delivery mechanism for that.
I return to NYU as adjunct faculty in January, for one semester. I am looking forward to it more than I expected to.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
The Golf, Cigars, & Scotch: Balancing Fatherhood, Friendship, and Fine-Living audiobook.
I wrote a memoir steeped in a particular kind of masculine warmth — the cadence of men talking on a golf course, the pauses, the ribbing. I wanted a voice in the register of a Morgan Freeman or a James Earl Jones. What I did instead was move fast. I hired a narrator on a referral because the credentials looked right, and I did not listen closely enough before I signed.
The finished files came back with no soul in them. The cadence was off. The funny parts did not land. Half the book runs on golf and scotch vocabulary that most people cannot pronounce, let alone time correctly. There is a joke in there about surviving my son’s worst behavior with nine holes, a Glenfiddich, and a Liga Privada H99. In the recording it lands like a compliance briefing.
I considered narrating it myself, but I did not have the time and I have never much liked my own voice. A year in, I accepted that I had to slow down and get it right.
I terminated the contract. It cost me money and months, and I started over.
The lesson: speed is not the same as momentum. I had confused activity with progress, and I had let a credential stand in for a fit assessment. Now I ask a different question about every vendor and partner — not “are they qualified” but “do they hear what I hear.” Qualification is easy to verify. Attunement is the thing that actually determines whether the work survives contact with an audience.
Can you describe how you or your organization is making a significant social impact?
Holmes Holdings is a literary curation company, and I use “curation” deliberately. The impact model is not that I write books. It is that I aim to move stories from where they are extracted to where they are understood.
The three verticals are not three businesses. They are three positions in one chain of inheritance.
Golf, Cigars, & Scotch is the transmitter’s seat — a man in middle age taking inventory of what he received from the men around him and what he is able to hand on. Fatherhood, friendship, and the small rituals where men actually talk to each other.
Evan’s Chronicles is the moment of transfer. It is identity-affirming storytelling for young readers — an educational philosophy in book form. A child who sees himself as a protagonist develops a different relationship to his own future than a child who never does.
Dreams Deferred: Young, Jobless, and South African is what a broken chain looks like at national scale. It carries the fieldwork testimonies of young South Africans into the scholarly record under their own terms — not as anonymized data points supporting someone else’s thesis, but as accounts with authority. That matters because youth unemployment in South Africa is chronically discussed as a statistic and almost never as an experience, and policy built on statistics alone keeps failing in the same predictable ways.
The through-line: the most undervalued asset people of color hold is authorship of their own story, and the extraction of narratives without authorship is a live economic problem, not just a moral one. The inheritance that matters most is control of your own story.
Can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was impacted or helped by your cause?
Her name is Amaya, and she is a student at Howard University. I met her at a virtual gathering of the Black Professionals in International Affairs organization.
She did not need what most people assume a young person needs. She was not lost. She was wise beyond her years and she knew exactly what she wanted — which is rarer than people think, and which changes the job entirely. My role was never to hand her a direction. It was to help her sharpen the one she already had.
So we worked on the things nobody teaches: how to be strategic rather than merely busy, how to network with a purpose instead of collecting contacts, how to look at a closed door and find the three other ways into the building. That last one is the skill. Most young people are taught to work harder at the front entrance.
Right now we are working to secure funding for her graduate studies at SAIS, through a direct contact who facilitates honors and merit awards. That contact came through Howard, my alma mater — which is the part I want people to notice. Nothing I gave her was mine alone. It was a relationship someone else extended to me years ago, moving one more time.
That is the whole model. I am not a resource. I am a conduit, and the measure of the work is whether Amaya becomes one too.
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?
One: stop treating youth unemployment as a skills problem when it is frequently a logistics problem. A young person in Diepsloot, Tembisa, Alexandra, or Soweto often cannot afford the transport to attend the interview, let alone the first three weeks of work before a paycheck arrives. We fund training programs enthusiastically and transport subsidies almost never. That is a policy design failure, not a preference failure by the young.
Two: fund longitudinal qualitative research, not just quarterly labor statistics. Many governments measure the unemployment rate constantly and understand the texture of unemployment almost not at all. We know how many are unemployed. We do not know what it does to a household over five years. That gap is why interventions keep getting designed for a person who does not exist.
Three: fix the bridge between credential and first job. I believe public employment programs are too often terminal — they end and deposit the participant back where they started with a certificate. Tie them to placement obligations with employers, and hold both sides accountable for what happens twelve months out, not at graduation.
And for readers in the diaspora specifically: buy locally authored work, cite local scholars, and stop treating expertise from the Global South as raw material for analysis produced somewhere else.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why?
1. The first offer is never the best offer. I have had interest in translation and foreign rights for Golf, Cigars, & Scotch, and my instinct the first time was to say yes immediately, because being wanted is flattering and flattery is a poor negotiating position. I slowed down instead. I am still negotiating, still doing diligence — territory by territory, term length, who controls the translation itself, what happens when the term ends. That patience has cost me months and it has already saved me from one arrangement I would have regretted for a decade. Diligence is not distrust. A rights deal you rushed outlives the excitement that made you rush it.
2. Build the company, not the book. I incorporated Holmes Holdings as a three-vertical company before I had proven a single one, and it felt reckless at the time. It was the best structural decision I made. A book is an asset; a company is a platform, and only one of them compounds. The structure also forced me to answer a question most authors never have to: what connects these? Once I could see that the memoir, the children’s series, and the monograph were all asking what we inherit and who gets to tell the story of it, I stopped being a man with three unrelated projects and became a publisher with a thesis. The company did not follow the idea. The company produced the idea.
3. Your voice is not a delivery mechanism, it is the product. See the audiobook. I learned this expensively.
4. Branding is a second job, and no one warns you. I thought I was getting into writing. I am also, now, maintaining several websites, working with a social media manager and a publicist, and thinking about platform mechanics constantly. My YouTube channel, The Doc Holmes Experience, has grown past 28,000 followers without daily content, which taught me that consistency of identity matters more than frequency of posting. The harder discipline is separation. Academic journal writing, a golf and lifestyle podcast, and children’s content are three audiences who should not be handed each other’s material. A journal editor should not meet my scotch reviews first. A parent looking for my children’s series should not land on a cigar page. Same author, deliberately marked doors.
5. The academic credential opens the door and then becomes irrelevant. A Ph.D. from Howard got me taken seriously in rooms. Neither taught me how to price a book, negotiate foreign rights, or read an ACX contract. I had to learn the trade as a beginner at forty-plus, and the sooner you accept beginner status, the faster it passes.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.” — Muhammad Ali
We all know what those words cost him. Ali refused induction into the military on religious grounds and lost everything for it — his title, his license, more than three years of his athletic prime — before the Supreme Court vindicated him. He practiced Islam publicly at a time when many Black Americans were counseled to keep their faith quiet, and he was loud and unapologetic in an era that rewarded Black men for being neither.
I have always been a risk taker. I have failed more times than I can count, and I have learned to take calculated risks rather than reckless ones — a distinction you only earn by paying for it.
The largest risk I took was leaving. I was in my forties with a Ph.D., an MBA, nearly two decades in foreign affairs, and a title on the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa. That is the part of a career you are supposed to protect. I pivoted to build a storytelling company, and not around one book — around three verticals at once, from abroad.
What Ali understood is that declining the risk is not neutral. It is not a hold. It is a quiet, well-dressed, entirely guaranteed way of accomplishing nothing, and it arrives with far better optics than failing out loud.
The other line I carry is Langston Hughes’s question about the dream deferred, which gives my monograph its title. Hughes asked what happens to a dream when it is postponed. My entire body of fieldwork is an attempt to answer that question with evidence rather than metaphor.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why?
Kylian Mbappé.
I know that sounds like a strange pick for an American scholar who loves socio-political issues, and that is precisely why I would want the table.
Mbappé has spent years in a dispute with the French Football Federation over image rights — over who decides which brands get to attach themselves to his face. He refused to sit for a team photo before the 2022 World Cup, his teammates backed him, and the federation was forced to revise its agreement. The fight resurfaced ahead of the 2026 tournament over a betting company’s campaign. His reasoning has never been about money. He has said plainly that many of them come from neighborhoods where those products have destroyed people.
That is narrative control stated more clearly than most academics manage in a chapter. A young Black man from Bondy — a Paris suburb the French press spent decades narrating as a problem to be managed — decided he would be the one to say what his own image means, and he was willing to absorb the cost to prove it.
It is the same argument I make about testimony. The distance between a footballer’s likeness and a young South African’s account of his own unemployment is shorter than it looks. Both are assets. Both get monetized by institutions with better lawyers than the person who generated them.
But I would want to ask him the harder question, the one my work sits on. Mbappé is the exception from Bondy, and exceptions are dangerous. A society can point to the one boy who got out and treat him as evidence that the structure works. My forthcoming book, Dreams Deferred is about the ones who do not get out — the young people in Alexandra and Soweto with no talent a global market wants to buy. I would like to know how he carries that. Whether it sits on him. What he believes he owes the ones still there.
And then I would want to hear about his mother and his father, because everything I write is finally about what gets handed down.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
Narrative control.
The principle is simple: the people who live a story should own the telling of it, and should capture the value it generates.
Africa’s most undervalued asset is a story. The current arrangement is that African experience gets extracted, processed elsewhere, and sold back at a markup — in documentaries, in development reports, in novels, in policy analysis. The raw material moves north. The value stays north. We have a well-developed language for calling this out when it happens with cobalt or diamonds and almost none for when it happens with testimony.
But I did not learn this pattern in Africa. I learned it at home, as a Black man in America, long before I ever set foot in Johannesburg.
Many black writers and curators know what it feels like for their work to be devalued, their experience tossed aside, and having “someone else” authenticate them before being permitted to speak.
The pattern never left. Zora Neale Hurston spent her life collecting the folklore of her own people and was buried in an unmarked grave until Alice Walker went looking for it. Henrietta Lacks gave modern medicine one of its most valuable assets (the world’s first immortal human cell line — the HeLa cell line) without her knowledge and without a dollar reaching her family for generations.
Same structure, one ocean apart. The young man in Alexandra who gives four hours of his life to a researcher is standing in a line that runs back through Baltimore and the Mississippi Delta.
Which means I have to hold myself to this too. Shared ancestry is not a permit. I walk into a township with a notepad and a Ph.D., and if I am not careful I become one more person converting somebody’s hardest years into a chapter with my name on the spine. Being Black American does not exempt me from the extraction pattern. It obligates me to know it by heart.
A narrative control movement would mean African and Black authorship treated as the default rather than as an achievement. It would mean citation practices that treat African scholars as sources rather than subjects. It would mean every person who gives testimony understands what that account becomes and who profits from it.
We already know how to be outraged about stolen land, stolen labor, and stolen bodies. I want the same clarity about stolen stories.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Website: www.docholmesholdings.com
Book site: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple books, Audibles, and wherever books are sold
YouTube: The Doc Holmes Experience- https://youtube.com/@thedocholmesexperience?si=dR7xzb8Wmx-sX4az
Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/coreywholmes
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/corey-holmes-phd-672a5916
Instagram / X / Facebook / TikTok: @gcsholmes
Golf, Cigars, & Scotch is available in print and as an audiobook on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Audible, and Apple Books.
Dreams Deferred: Young, Jobless, and South African is forthcoming from Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Evan’s Chronicles, the first installment in a children’s series, is forthcoming.
Thank you so much for the time, and for all that you are doing!
About The Interviewer: Yitzi Weiner is a journalist, author, and the founder & Editor-In-Chief of Authority Magazine. The guiding principle behind all of Authority Magazine’s content is that good stories should be beautiful to heart, mind, and eyes. Yitzi is also the CEO of Authority Magazine’s Thought Leader Incubator, which has guided dozens of leaders to become trusted authorities in their field after becoming syndicated columnists, authors, and media commentators. Yitzi is also the author of five books. At Authority Magazine, Yitzi has conducted or coordinated more than 4000 empowering interviews with prominent Authorities like Shaquille O’Neal, Floyd Mayweather, Kelly Rowland, Bobbi Brown, Daymond John, Lori Greiner, Robert Herjavec, Lindsay Lohan, Cal Ripken Jr., Jillian Michaels, Derek Hough, and the C-Suite executives of companies like eBay, Kroger, American Express, MasterCard, 3M, L’Oréal, Walgreens, Intuit, Virgin, Campbell, Walmart, CVS, Wells Fargo, AT&T, Oracle, ZOOM, Udemy, Samuel Adams Beer, Zappos, Adobe, Capital One, Lockheed Martin, Gallup, Procter & Gamble , Anheuser-Busch, Chipotle, Starbucks, and thousands others. A trained Rabbi, Yitzi is also a dynamic educator, teacher and orator. He currently lives in Maryland with his wife and children. If you are a successful leader in your field, and think you would be a good fit for the Thought leader Incubator, feel free to reach out to Yitzi anytime.
Social Impact Heroes: How Dr. Corey W. Holmes Of Holmes Holdings Is Helping To Change Our World was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.