All about me
About Myself
Name: Holly Edgell
Gender: Female
Age: 41 years old
Born: August 6, 1969
Education: MA & BA in Journalism
Quirky facts about me: I was Miss Belize in 1986-87. The contest allowed me to travel, including a trip to represent Belize at the Miss Universe Pageant in Singapore. I did some acting in high school and college. I love crossword puzzles.
MY CONTACT info
interests
TV: Anything with “Law & Order” in the title. Also: The Closer, LOST, The Wire, The Tudors, 48 Hours Mystery, 30 Rock, Seinfeld, Forensic Files, House Hunters International, the Today Show.
I get my news from: NPR, CNN, The New York Times (online), The Week
Periodicals I like: The New Yorker, Budget Travel, National Geographic, The New York Review of Books
Travel: Due to all the moving around I’ve done with my family and as an individual I’ve been to about 30 countries! Highlights since 2002 include Cuba, Armenia, Russia, Antigua & Barbuda, Barbados and France. And, of course, a number of visits to Belize. Places on my wish list: Brazil, Spain, Jamaica, South Africa, the Czech Republic, Norway. Places I want to revisit: Kenya, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Italy, Greece, India.
From Belize to Missouri
(and the places in between)
My parents met in British Honduras in the mid-1960s, where my mother was a journalist and teacher and my father was director of CARE. I was born just about a year after they were married. In two months we were on the move: to Nigeria, where my father was part of CARE work to help rebuild parts of the country torn up during the Biafran War. Over the course of my formative years, we lived in the United Kingdom (1972-73), the United States (1973), and Afghanistan (1974-77) where my brother Randall “Randy” Clive Edgell came into the world!
After Afghanistan, the Edgells lived back in the US for a short while and then moved to Bangladesh (1978-80). Then, we moved back to my native land, now called Belize (1980-82), where we built a home in Belize City.
Our familial meanderings took us back to the US (1982-84) and then to East Africa (1984-86), where my parents lived in Somalia and my brother and I attended boarding school in Kenya.
Then, it was back to the land of my birth. After about a year in Belize, I left for college in the US and my family settled into a seven-year stint in one place - a first for us!
Clearly, my peripatetic early life made an impression on me as I entered adulthood. After college in Michigan I lived back in Belize, then moved to South Florida (just in time for Hurricane Andrew), went to grad school in Ohio, and embarked on a television news career that took me to Youngstown, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Detroit in the 1990s. (See Resume for the details)
I shifted gears in 2001, moving to Florida to teach journalism at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee. In 2006 I joined the faculty at the Missouri School of Journalism as an assistant professor and executive producer at KOMU-TV, the NBC affiliate where the newsroom serves as a teaching lab for journalism students.
So now, where am I? In St. Louis as a new member of the team at Patch.com, a network of hyper local news websites sprouting up across the United States.
