About the Author
Chris Holaday is the author of a dozen books, the most recent of which, Cracks in the Outfield Wall, The History of Baseball Integration in the Carolinas, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2024.
Chris grew up in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas. He graduated from the University of North Carolina where he studied the totally unrelated fields of political science and geology. He (much later) graduated magna cum laude with a master’s degree in U.S. history from North Carolina Central University.
In between the two stints as a student, Chris worked as a professional marketing writer, first in the sporting goods industry, then in specialty grocery. All the while, he wrote on the side; his first book, Professional Baseball in North Carolina, was published in 1997. It won the Sporting News-SABR Baseball Research Award in 1998. In the years since, his writing has resulted in a small stack of books. They are often about baseball (because there are so many untold and related stories) but other subjects include food and restaurants. He is currently working on a book about a shipwreck and a murder trial, in which the word baseball is never uttered (ok, maybe once…).
Chris has taught history at the college level and currently teaches writing fulltime at Duke University. He lives with his wife and squirrel-obsessed dog in Durham, North Carolina.