Tom Holm has been a professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson since 1980. During that time, he has won several prestigious teaching and mentoring awards. His latest monograph, The Great Confusion in Indian A√airs: Natives and Whites in the Progressive Era, was published by the University of Texas Press in 2005. In 1996, his book, Strong Hearts, Wounded Souls was a finalist for the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnology. Holm is Muscogee Creek and Cherokee, enrolled in the Cherokee Nation, and is very active in Native community a√airs. Born in northeastern Oklahoma, he attended Northeastern State College in Tahlequah and later received three degrees from the University of Oklahoma at Norman. Since 2004, he has served the Cherokee Nation as a member of the Sequoyah Commission, a group of Cherokee scholars, and he has been named as a member of the American Indian Graduate Center's Council of 100, a group of elders, scholars, and leaders. A Vietnam veteran who served with Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines, from 1967 to 1968, Holm has a deep interest in veterans' a√airs.

He was a member of the first Native American advisory committee to the Veterans Administration, and he is a former president of the Arizona Territory Gourd Society and the Southwest Gourd Society (Native American veterans' societies). He sings with the Panther Creek Singers, a traditional Southern Drum group. Professor Holm and Ina, his wife of thirty-eight years, have two sons and four grandchildren.