Lorraine Bennett is guest speaker on Sept. 10 at Moss Memorial Library.
By Joan Howard
Guest Writer
Novelist Lorraine Martin Bennett will speak at Coffee With Poets and Writers at the Moss Memorial Library in Hayesville at 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 10. The event is sponsored by NCWN-West.
Bennett has recently published three new, exciting novels and has had a distinguished career as reporter at the Los Angeles Times and Atlanta Journal.
Bennett is a print, web and broadcast journalist who grew up in the rural Martins Creek Community near Murphy, N.C., graduated with her high school class journalism medal and received a scholarship to UNC Chapel Hill where she earned her degree.
Her reporting career began on the Atlanta Journal where she wrote features, covered news and the Georgia State Senate and met her late husband Tom, also a journalist. She was hired by the Los Angeles Times and became the newspaper’s first woman to head a domestic bureau.
She joined Ted Turner’s fledgling CNN as a news writer when the burgeoning network was only three years old. There she became copy editor, producer and editorial manager before ending her television career at CNN International.
In retirement, she writes essays, short stories, flash fiction, poetry and still practices her craft by copy editing and writing for the Clay County Progress.
Bennett’s essays have appeared in the Personal Story Publishing Project (Daniel Boone Footsteps, Winston-Salem) and her poetry has been published by the Huntsville Literary Association. Her first novel, a psychological thriller titled Cat on a Black Moon, was published by Austin Macauley (London, Cambridge, New York) in 2023. A sequel, Darla, was published by the same group in 2024 and a third novel, 20 Seconds to Midnight, is due for publication in the coming months. Reflections, a book of poetry, essays, short stories and flash fiction, is being published by Booklogix of Alpharetta, Ga.
Her essays are available on the web and her novels are sold on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kindle and other websites. She will be selling her books at the North Georgia Regional Book Fair in Dahlonega, Ga. on Sept. 13 and at the Beal Center in Hayesville on Black Friday, Nov. 28.
Coffee With Poets and Writers meets at 10:30 a.m. at the Moss Library every second Wednesday from March to December. The event is free. An open mike will follow the presentation. Bring a poem or prose work of about three minutes to participate. CWPW is sponsored by North Carolina Writers’ Network West (NCWN-W) which also includes writers in Towns, Union, Fannin and Rabun counties in Georgia. For details call joanhoward 121@gmail.com.