Nora Holt

Her mother encouraged her to start piano lessons at age four, giving her an early affinity for music and leading to her playing organ for several years in St. Augustine's Episcopal Church in Kansas City.

[citation needed] Holt graduated valedictorian from Western University at Quindaro, Kansas in 1917 with a bachelor's degree in music.

[7] From 1917 to 1923, Holt contributed music criticism to the Chicago Defender, one of the most famous and influential black newspapers in America.

Among her colleagues in this movement were composers and artists such as Florence Price, Robert Nathaniel Dett, and Clarence Cameron White.

It was in this magazine where Holt published two of her own compositions, Negro Dance, for piano and The Sand-Man, an art song with text by Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Holt's journal also contained contributions from artists and writers such as Clarence Cameron White, Kemper Harreld, Helen Hagan, and Maud Cuney Hare, among many others.

She became good friends many visionaries, activists, and novelists of the time, including Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten.