Background
Bruce Holbert was born in Ephrata, Washington. His father worked construction and his family resided in a dozen different places before he was school age.
Bruce Holbert was born in Ephrata, Washington. His father worked construction and his family resided in a dozen different places before he was school age.
He has also authored several short stories in nationally recognized magazines. Holbert graduated from Lake Roosevelt High School in Coulee Dam in the spring of 1978, then attended Eastern Washington University where he graduated with a degree in English/Education in 1983. In August 1982, Holbert inadvertently shot and killed one of his friends in a gun accident.
Charges against Holbert were eventually dropped.
Holbert has stated that he remains "numbed by guilt."
He took teaching jobs in Jerome, Idaho and Saint John Washington before attending The University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop where he assisted in editing The Iowa Review and earned a Teaching Writing Fellowship. He graduated with an Master of Fine Arts in 1990
Holbert returned to teaching and raising his family in 1990 in Saint John, John Rogers High School in Spokane and Mount Spokane High School in Mead.
He also published stories in The Iowa Review, Other Voices, The Antioch Review, and Crab Creek Review. In May 2012, Holbert’s first novel, Lonesome Animals (Counterpoint Press) appeared.
Praised as “audacious” by Kirkus and “the hands of a master storyteller” in a starred review by Publishers Weekly, the book has garnered praise as both a literary Western and crime novel.
