BIOGRAPHY
Darren J. Glenn is a Trinidadian-born, American intersectional environmentalist, racial justice and LGBTQ+ rights advocate, and librarian based in the New York City area. Born in his parents' hometown in 1988, Darren immigrated to the United States in 1993, and grew up in Queens, NY, and then Long Island. While pursuing higher education, he developed a passion for social justice. After receiving a Master’s Degree in Library Science at Syracuse University, Darren was able to live in Germany and Mexico developing his language and transnational resource mobilization skills.
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He resettled in the Greater New York area in 2016 and became a volunteer at the NY-based LGBTQ+ advocacy non-profit the Caribbean Equality Project. He took on the role of the organization's Programs Director in 2018, developing his skills and his passion for grant writing, program design, and community organizing. In 2020, he and his brother ultimately co-founded their own non-profit in Trinidad and Tobago, the Glenn Family Foundation, to address critical social, economic, and environmental issues throughout the Caribbean. In addition to his roles at the Glenn Family Foundation and Caribbean Equality Project, Glenn now serves as a volunteer for Permatours and the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island's Creation Care Ministry, as well as works as a public librarian in Brooklyn, NY.
BIOGRAPHY
In November of 1988, Darren Julian Glenn was born in San Juan, Trinidad, the same village that both of his parents were born in, grew up, met and married. As part of a typical, middle-class Afro-Trinidadian family, Darren was exposed to the values of community, healthy ambition and the importance of education.
In 1993, Darren and his family emigrated to Queens, New York and faced a number of hardships adjusting to life in America. Poverty, racist employment discrimination, xenophobia, denial of access to services; Darren's parents overcame them all in order to establish a sustainable and safe life in the United States. His father ended up founding a plumbing company and his mother ended up beginning a prestigious and high-powered accounting career with CitiGroup. It was during this time that Darren discovered his love for both the written word as well as for the public librar yas a safe and welcoming space.
After moving around a number of times throughout Queens, NY, The Glenn Family, including his American-born younger siblings, eventually settled in Valley Stream in Nassau County. In this diverse Long Island town, Darren did most of his growing up, becoming involved in his public school's literary magazines, student council, Peace Club, theatre clubs and honor society. All the while, he began to face more directly the challenges of being a black immigrant in the United States as well as coming to terms with being gay in a strictly pentecostal family.
These challenges all facilitated the awakening of his social consciousness in college where he studied Comparative Literature and learned to speak German. In 2011, Darren went on to pursue a Master's Degree in Library and Information Science at Syracuse University where he aimed to apply his flourishing social consciousness to his career in librarianship. He earned his MLIS in 2013 along with a TEFL certification before taking a contract as a project assistant at a Syracuse-based literacy non-profit organization. There he advocated for a greater focus on literacy-related causes as a standard of American librarianship among national partners as well as before members of the US Senate.
After a number of other assignments, including youth programming at Brooklyn Public Library, Darren temporarily moved to Germany to improve his language skills and investigate the possibility of permanently relocating to the central European state. It was there that his desire to give back to his native Trinidad and Tobago reached a fever pitch, and he vowed to mobilize the resources to begin pursuing his passions sooner rahter than later. He has since lived in Mexico to improve his Spanish and studied Turkish.
In 2016, Darren founded the Glenn Family Foundation to incubate a variety of projects that realize his dreams for bettering his home country.