Dennis Graham Holt (born October 6, 1942) 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 (where his graduate advisor was William Bright), receiving from the last of these four degrees in Linguistics (B.A. 1972, M.A. 1973, C.Phil. 1975, and Ph.D. 1986). 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 Center in the Venice Beach District of the city, an association that continued throughout most of the decade of the 1970s. During the weekly gatherings of the workshop, Holt became friends with a number of the poets who were to be active in the Los Angeles poetry-scene throughout the following 40 years, including some of the poets whose works were collected in the workshop-based anthology Venice Thirteen (1972): Joseph Hansen and John Harris (the two directors of the workshop), Luis Campos, Harry Northup, and Barry Simons. Others included Steve Goldman, Milan Rastislav Šalka, Lynne Bronstein, Scott Wannberg, Leland Hickman, Jim Krusoe, Michael C. Ford, Paul Vangelisti, and Bill Mohr. Holt published his first book of poetry, Windings, in 1973. Since 1978, Holt has produced and published occasional samizdat bardic broadsheets under various titles, including Some Bard's-Eye Views from Santa Cruz, Le Missoulambator, La Fogata Cruceña, The Quincunx, and others. In 1979 Holt took up residence in Santa Cruz County, California, where he became active in local poetry events and published one issue of a literary-artistic journal, Onicnomachitocac, which included poetry, prose, & drawings by five others plus himself. During the period December 1979 to February 1980, Holt conducted field-work on the Tepecano and Huichol languages in northern Jalisco state, Mexico, concentrating primarily on the color-terminology of these languages. (Some of his findings are included in Robert MacLaury's book, Color and Cognition in Mesoamerica: Constructing Categories as Vantages ) In 1981 Holt returned to Los Angeles to work with his father on a television-project and there met and later married (in