Kimberly willis holt biography wikipedia

Home— Amarillo, TX. Office— P. Box , Amarillo, TX Radio news director, ; worked in advertising and marketing, ; interior decorator, ; writer, —. Kimberly Willis Holt writes poignant coming-of-age fiction for young readers, and her novels and short stories hum with the sleepy rhythms of small-town life.

Kimberly Willis Holt is an American writer of children's books.

Since publishing her first novel, My Louisiana Sky, in , she has continued to expand her focus, moving from the American South west to Texas, and including picture books as well as the anthology Part of Me: Stories of a Louisiana Family in her list of published works. Her fiction has been praised for its realistic depiction of life in the rural South, and for the iconoclastic, but sympathetic characters she creates within her fictional world.

Holt was born in , in Pensacola, Florida, the site of a large naval base. Her father worked for many years as a chef for the U. Navy, and her mother was a teacher. Julian Willis's job took the family to several far-flung places during Holt's young life, including France and the Pacific Ocean territory of Guam. They also lived in a number of American states, but always made Forest Hill, Louisiana, their spiritual home.

Holt's grandmother lived there, and the future author loved spending time in a place where her roots ran so deep. This work, like others by the Georgia native, explored human isolation and life in the South through the vantage point of an eloquent outsider, and the style of fiction moved the young Holt. Holt studied broadcast journalism at the University of New Orleans in the late s and Louisiana State University until , but left school to work as a news director for a radio station.