M. M. Holaday is a former reference and rare-book librarian. She loves books for their power to educate, influence, and entertain. She also loves history, road trips, and the farm where she and her husband maintain a tallgrass prairie.
After a trip West with her parents at the age of ten, M.M. Holaday fell in love with cross-country travel and aspired to be part of the production crew for the “On the Road with Charles Kuralt” segments she watched on the CBS Evening News. The pipe dream lingered into young adulthood as she crisscrossed the US from the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness area in Idaho to Padre Island in Texas, and from Sabino Canyon in Arizona to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. She still prefers driving to any other type of travel, and is certain that the road trip she took with her boyfriend in 1985—an 1,800 mile journey in a pickup truck to Iowa Park, Texas, to retrieve his grandfather’s vintage 1951 Buick—was a sign that she should marry him. They are still married.
M. M. Holaday is a graduate of St. Olaf College and the University of Minnesota Graduate School of Library Science. She is a member of the Historical Novel Society, National Parks Conservation Association, The Wilderness Society, and the Missouri Prairie Foundation.
Photo by Chris Casper