Jeff Holt:  

Life Life bio...hmmm....I grew up in Wedgwood, a suburb in Ft. Worth, and went to 4 different schools before winding up at the dreaded Wedgwood Middle School. I grew my hair out as fast as I could, blew off school work, and descended into the world of heavy metal music and all that goes with it. When I got to Southwest High School, it was more of the same except that I started putting enough effort into school to get mostly As and Bs, as I was told these grades actually "counted" for college. I learned that I had a talent in my freshman year at Southwest when a poem of mine was selected as the 9th grade winner for the Creative Writing Journal. I started writing with more fervor, then, something that I continue to do to this day. If anyone is interested, some of my more recent poems are published online. Email me if you would like the web address. The highlight of high school, for me, was being on the Creative Writing staff in my junior and senior years. There I met friends that have endured, as well as my first wife, Elaine, and had a lot of fun that didn't necessarily involve alcohol or other, umm, mood enhancers. As an undergraduate at UT Arlington, I began to take school seriously for the first time. I naturally gravitated toward English and became rather obsessed with literature, abandoning Stephen King for William Faulkner and other great novelists. I also began writing poetry more seriously and studying poets, focusing especially on the Romantic poets. In 1993, Elaine and I moved to Denton where both of us attended the University of North Texas. I majored in English, she in Library Science. This was a tough time. I became disillusioned with the way literature was being studied at the same time that my marriage was falling apart. Picking up the pieces, about a year after I got my first Master's degree in English, I went back to UNT to become a counselor. This was a good ti...Expand for more