Jessica Holt

Growing up, Jessica Holt had a story for everything. Not only did she have a story, but she had the best and most attention-grabbing story. And if someone one-upped her story, she had another story that she forgot to tell when she was telling her first story.

Looking back, she prefers to think her occasional exaggerations of the truth were just fulfilling her destiny to be a storyteller. Honing her craft, if you will. Fortunately, sometime during the fourth grade, she reached her spoken-word limit, and her storytelling evolved from being passed on orally to being written down for her own eyes only.

Twenty years later, she was sitting in yet another classroom when she had an idea for a story. Rather than raising her hand and telling her elaborate tale like she did when she was younger, she let her fingers do the talking, and while the rest of her classmates were playing solitaire on their laptops, she started typing the beginnings of a story about a girl named Liza and a small town in South Carolina.

And the rest is from behind her eyes to yours.