Dannye Romine Powell

(January 4, 1941 - October 10, 2024)

Dannye Romine Powell is the author of four previous collections, two of which have won the Brockman-Campbell Award for the best book of poetry published by a North Carolinian in the previous year. She’s won fellowships in poetry from the NEA, the North Carolina Arts Council and the writer’s colony Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in many magazines and journals, among them The Paris Review, Ploughshares, 32 Poems, Harvard Review Online, The Southern Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Cave Wall and Tar River. A longtime book editor for the Charlotte Observer, Powell is also the author of Parting the Curtains: Interviews with Southern Writers. She lives in a yellow house across from a park with her husband Lew Powell, also a long-time journalist.

Praise for Dannye Romine Powell

Dannye Powell’s poems are insightful and smart, and her gift for the perfect metaphor continues to feel effortless and natural. She finds humor in some of the bumps life amply provides, so that even poems dealing with difficult moments and tough issues leave the reader feeling uplifted.

—Susan Ludvigson, author of Wave as If You Can See Me

As always, Dannye Romine Powell's highly individual way of looking at the world yields poems that delight and surprise, never flinching at painful or complicated subjects but continuously revealing strange and unexpected truths. This book is a treasure.

—Patricia Hooper, author of Wild Persistence

A new collection of poetry by Dannye Romine Powell remains cause for celebration; and her latest, In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver, underscores her abiding reputation as a poet of breathtaking candor and precision, the consummate craftswoman, who painstakingly parses syllables into words as if sifting for gold. These yearning, often prayerful, poems are laced with shimmer, incandescence—sometimes blinding—moments of recognition and epiphany that inform every chiseled line Powell commits to paper. Above all, her work is intricately exacting. She gets things right: the truth, the light, how we say things, how we don’t say things, the nuanced choreography of imperceptibly monumental moments. Yet, make no mistake: the poet desists sentimentality, as she does so fiercely at every turn in this amazingly beautiful and courageous volume. This is a very important book by a very important poet at the summit of her powers.

—Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina Poet Laureate and author of The 13th Sunday after Pentecost