Dennis Holt

Who is Dennis Holt?

Dennis Graham Holt is an American poet, linguist, and translator.

Born in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, Holt graduated from Van Nuys High School in Los Angeles in 1960. Holt subsequently attended the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, Berkeley, and UCLA, receiving from the last of these four degrees in Linguistics. From September 1966 until November 1969, he served in the Peace Corps in Bolivia, working with cooperative coffee-processing plants in the province of Nor Yungas, and later teaching English as a second language at the Instituto Anglo-Americano in Oruro.

Following his Peace Corps service, Holt returned to Los Angeles in 1970, where he soon became involved with the Venice Poetry Workshop at the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Foundation in the Venice Beach District of the city, an association that continued throughout most of the decade of the 1970s.