Bruce Holbert grew up in the country described in his novel Lonesome Animals-- a combination of rocky scabland farms and desert brush at the foot of the Okanogan Mountains. What once was the Columbia River, harnessed now by a series of reservoirs and dams, dominates the topography. Holbert's great-grandfather, Arthur Strahl, was an Indian scout and among the first settlers of the Grand Coulee. The man was a bit of a legend until he murdered Holbert's grandfather (Strahl's son-in-law) and made Holbert's grandmother a widow and Holbert's father fatherless. A fictionalized Strahl is the subject of Lonesome Animals.Bruce Holbert is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, where he assisted in editing The Iowa Review and held a Teaching Writing Fellowship. His fiction has appeared in The Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Other Voices, The Antioch Review, Crab Creek Review, The Spokesman Review, The West Wind Review, Cairn, RiverLit and has one annual awards from the Tampa Tribune Quarterly and The Inlander. His non-fiction has appeared in The New Orleans Review, The Spokesman Review and The Daily Iowan, and his poetry in RiverLit.