Author waited till Golden Years before first book published

By CHARLES W. JOHNSON / News Editor for the Southern Standard

A.H. Holt, left, and Magness Library director Mary Robbins pose with Holt’s two books “Silver Creek” and “Kendrick,” which were published when the author was 68 and 69, respectively. (Charles W. Johnson photo)

At an age when most people are retired, author A.H. Holt was able to get her first novel published.

Fresh off the success of that book, a Western called “Silver Creek,” Holt is touting her second book “Kendrick” which came out this month.

Holt was in town yesterday for Magness Library’s Lunch at the Library program where she discussed her unusual success.

“My first book, I was 68,” she said. “My second book I was 69, and I’ll be 70 in September. And I got my first book published by the first publisher I sent it too.”

Early on Holt, like many women, juggled work and raising five children, but as they got older, she decided she wanted to continue her education and began taking college courses whenever she could squeeze them in.

“I started back to school, you’re not going to believe this, back in 1972,” she said, noting she was in her 40s at the time. “They opened the community colleges in Virginia and we all had to go and take our SATs to get in at first. I still had five children at home. I worked every day, so I could just do one class at a time. So it took me 15 years to do my community college work.”

Holt encourages everyone to keep learning, even though it may take years in some cases to earn degrees, particularly if they work as well.

“I worked all along,” she said. “And it sometimes takes you a long time, but you can still keep juggling and keep it going.”

The fledgling author says age is no barrier if someone is determined.

“Everyone needs to know that age is not a learning disability,” she said. “I am working on my dissertation for my PhD in history,” she added, “and I’m about half through it. I’m doing the history of Florida prisons.”

Holt said she has been writing through the years, but mostly poetry and short stories. It was only recently she decided to tackle a novel.

“I was writing the dissertation two summers ago,” she said. “And I just got bored and started digging out stuff. I was going to get my poems published in a book.”

But an old short story caught her attention .

“I ran across this little story and I started typing it in,” Holt said, “and it started growing. It needed a back-story. It needed to have things explained, so it ended up being ‘Silver Creek.'”