Holly Gleason

When Holly Gleason started writing about country music for The Miami Herald as a college sophomore, she had no idea where it would lead. Not a clue she’d be on the road with Neil Young at 20, chase Merle Haggard around America for Spin, or in the studio with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band for their second Will The Circle Be Unbroken. She didn’t know she’d write regularly for Rolling Stone, The Los Angeles Times, CREEM, Musician, Tower Pulse, Playboy, Oxford American or do a cover story on Dolly Parton for The Saturday Evening Post. A former features editor for HITS, she moved to Nashville to start a country bureau for the magazine and left to head the Media & Artist Development Department at Sony Nashville. Two years later, she opened Joe’s Garage, Music City’s first boutique artist development and media relations firm, where she played an instrumental role in the careers of Kenny Chesney, Patty Loveless, Brooks & Dunn, Lee Ann Womack, John Prine and Rodney Crowell.
Since then, Holly has written songs: “Better as a Memory,” a two-week #1 voted I Wish I Wrote That Song by the NSAI, and “To Watch Maria Dance,” one of three new songs on Guy Clark: Best of the DualTone Years. She earned a Masters in Writing from Spalding University and teaches Music Criticism at MTSU. She has written about pop culture for numerous publications; her Unbearable Lightness of Being Taylor Swift was nominated for Best Lifestyle Writing from the global International Network of Street Papers. Most recently, she created and edited Woman Walk the Line: How the Women of Country Music Changed Our Lives. The anthology won the Belmont Book Prize for Excellence in a Book about Country Music.