The featured writers for September are Karen Paul Holmes and Lorraine Bennett.
Karen Paul Holmes has published two poetry books, No Such Thing as Distance (Terrapin, 2018) and Untying the Knot (Aldrich, 2014). Her poems have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac and The Slowdown. Publications include Diode, Valparaiso Review, Verse Daily, and Prairie Schooner. Holmes founded the Side Door Poets in Atlanta, which she still hosts. She also started Writers’ Night Out for the North Carolina Writers’ Network-West, which is now in its twelfth year. Held via Zoom on the second Friday of the month, Writers’ Night Out is hosted by Holmes and Glenda Beall. She also teaches periodically at the John C. Campbell Folk School. She will read mostly new poems at the Literary Hour as well as a short selection from No Such Thing as Distance.
Lorraine Martin Bennett is a print, web, and broadcast journalist who grew up in Murphy, North Carolina. She graduated from Murphy High School and UNC Chapel Hill. She has been a journalist with the Atlanta Journal where she met her late husband, Tom, a columnist for the Cherokee Scout. She also wrote for the Los Angeles Times and became the newspaper’s first woman to head a domestic bureau. She joined fledgling CNN as a news writer, becoming 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 occasionally writing articles for the Clay County Progress. Her essays have appeared in the Personal Story Publishing Project (Daniel Boone Footsteps, Winston-Salem) for the past two years, with another coming out soon. Her first novel, Cat on a Black Moon, a psychological thriller, will be published by Austin Macauley (London, Cambridge, New York) later this year. She will read the first two chapters from her new book.