As a poet, author and Charlotte Observer columnist, book editor and restaurant critic, Dannye Romine Powell’s achievements were many.
Yet her vibrant, warm and welcoming spirit is what friends and colleagues say they will forever cherish and miss most.
Powell died Thursday at age 83 in her and her husband’s longtime home in Charlotte’s Dilworth neighborhood. She died of lung cancer, her husband, Lew Powell, said.
Every student in Dannye Powell’s poetry class at Charlotte Center for Literary Arts, or Charlotte Lit, thought they were the teacher’s pet, co-founder Kathie Collins said.
“She had a natural curiosity and was so genuinely warm and interested in you,” Collins said.
That interest in others and the world around her is what helped make Powell “a great poet and journalist,” Collins is convinced.
“It was magic,” she said. “She was working some kind of magic.”
Lew Powell, a former longtime Observer editor, wrote his wife’s obituary at 5:30 a.m. Friday, he said. In it, he described himself as “never bored” thanks to her.
Dannye Powell’s Observer career spanned four decades.
Her Q and A’s with Walker Percy, Maya Angelou, Eudora Welty and other famous authors appear in her 1994 “Parting the Curtains: Interviews with Southern Writers.”
As a columnist, she covered the high-profile murder trials of Susan Smith, Michael Peterson and Josh Griffin in the Carolinas.
“Some of her best stories were about murders,” friend and former colleague Pam Kelly said.
As a columnist, she covered Peterson’s 2003 trial in Durham involving the killing of his wife. The murder is recounted in the Netflix series “The Staircase.”
“Surely,” Kelly said, “she was the only member of the press to describe an expert witness as ‘the most agreeable, nicest-looking, best-educated windbag I’ve ever seen.’”
In 2004, Powell revisited the town of Union, S.C., a decade after Susan Smith drowned her two boys. “Put yourself on the watery outskirts of a small S.C. textile town,” Powell’s story begins, “and watch as a young woman hesitates in the dark on the brink of a decision.”
Kelly said Powell told her that she suspected poets were born, not made. “And in her case, I think that was true,” Kelly said. “Dannye didn’t have a journalism background, but she had something better — a poet’s eye, which she brought to everything she wrote.”
“I looked up to Dannye,” Kelly said. “She had such a wide circle of friends. She had the qualities of good parents. She was encouraging. She was solid. She and Lew had a wisdom. She was so damn funny. God, I’m going to miss her.”
Lew Powell recalled how legendary Observer columnist Kays Gary admitted to an editor that he’d underestimated “this woman Romine.”
“No tricks,” Gary said, according to Lew Powell. “No contrivances. No preachments. Just powerful parables about real people. …. More than any other one person, Dannye reflects the best in a family newspaper.”
She was often underestimated
Her friendly nature caught unwilling interview subjects off guard and got them talking, author and former Observer columnist Tommy Tomlinson said.
She had a doggedness ferreting out facts, a devotion to revealing truths, colleagues said.
“She was underestimated quite a bit,” Tomlinson said. “But no one ever underestimated her twice.”
Tomlinson’s desk was near Powell’s when his Observer column debuted in 1997. He listened as she made people feel at ease on the phone before getting them to reveal what really was going on.
”Now wait a second,” he’d suddenly hear her say.
Regarding her writing, “you could feel the truth and power in her words,” Tomlinson said.
“People wanted to tell Dannye their stories,” former Observer managing editor Cheryl Carpenter said. “They saw in her an intuitive, empathetic soul who had patience and attentive listening skills.”
Powell stepped back and spotted a detail others overlooked, Carpenter said.
“She was an observer of the world both as a poet and a journalist,” Carpenter said. “Dannye’s tendency, always, was to go deep, and that took courage.”
Powell also wrote great obituaries of notable Charlotteans, years before they were ever expected to die, including former Observer publisher Rolf Neill’s, former colleagues said. That’s a common practice at newspapers.
She wrote Jack Claiborne’s. On Friday, the author and former Observer columnist and associate editor confirmed he’s getting along quite fine.
It won’t matter to him what she wrote about him, because he won’t be around to read it, Claiborne quipped. Knowing her skills, he’s sure it will be fine, he said.
Long Charlotte Observer career
Powell’s Observer career began in 1974 — thanks to her poetry.
Her first poem was published that year in The Paris Review. The poem so impressed Observer copy desk chief Luisita Lopez that Lopez hired her as book editor.
“That was her dream job,” Lew Powell said. “Everything else she did at the paper, she had to be forcefully drafted for.”
She published poetry throughout her newspaper career, winning a National Endowment for the Arts grant and residencies at Yaddo and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.
Her “At Every Wedding Someone Stays Home” collection of poems earned her the Miller Williams First Book Award from University of Arkansas Press. She twice won the annual Brockman-Campbell Award for best book of poetry published by a North Carolinian.
Even Lew Powell watching a baseball game on TV one brisk fall day became a poem that appeared in “The Baltimore Review.”
Dannye Powell added an asterisk at the end of that poem: She was 79 when she wrote the poem, she explained, the age her mother suffered a major stroke. She fretted all that year about being similarly stricken with something, and here was Lew watching baseball “and not giving one thought to our mortality.
“The differences in our personalities have kept our marriage alive and lively all these years,” she wrote.
Throughout her career, Powell also was a teacher who encouraged and inspired her poetry students, newsroom colleagues or others in the community, friends and colleagues said.
Powell’s knack for “skillful indirection”
“I wrote a column one time that came too easy,” Tomlinson said. He mentioned that to Powell, because most of the time it’s not easy.
“It came easy to you because you were ready to tell that story and trust your instincts,” Powell replied.
Powell’s method of critique was never to harp on the bad, her husband, friends and colleagues said. She had a gift for “skillful indirection,” Lew Powell said.
Friends referred to it as her “Social Circle talk,” a way of speaking rooted in small Southern towns, he said. It avoids direct criticism but still gets the message across, in a polite, indirect way, Powell’s friend and former longtime colleague Ed Williams said.
“Social Circle” referred to the Georgia hometown of Powell’s mother. Dannye Powell was a Miami native, but her heart belonged to Social Circle, Lew Powell said.
Dannye Powell was a “master practitioner” of Social Circle talk, Williams said. He was the former editorial page editor of the Observer and considers Lew Powell his best friend for over 50 years.
Dannye Powell was “an enormously thoughtful friend, a splendid writer and a gifted teacher,” Williams said. “She wanted to be her best possible self, and she wanted to help others do that, too.”
“Southern lady” to the core
Friend and former colleague Karen Garloch said she and Kelly took lunch to Powell in recent weeks, and they all enjoyed eating and conversing in Powell’s bedroom. Lew Powell served them drinks.
“Dannye had already been diagnosed with lung cancer, but she was sitting in bed asking all about our lives and complimenting the food we brought,” Garloch said in a text message from Spain on Friday, where she was vacationing. “All while wearing lipstick and peals! She was always a Southern lady, no matter what.”
Williams said he will miss Powells’ “good heart, her sharp wit, and her uncommon degree of empathy.“
“Dannye was a great asset to Charlotte,” Claiborne said. “She was a great asset to The Charlotte Observer, and a great asset to North Carolina.”
Besides her husband, Powell is survived by sons, Benjamin Houston “Hugh” Romine III and Daniel Patrick Romine, both of Charlotte, two granddaughters, a grandson and two great-granddaughters.
Her funeral is scheduled for 1 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 17, at Myers Park Baptist Church.
Memorials may be made to Crisis Assistance Ministry, 500-A Spratt St., Charlotte NC 28206’, and Charlotte Center for Literary Arts, P.O. Box 18607, Charlotte, N.C., 28218.
Online condolences can be shared at www.kennethpoeservices.com
