Dannye Gibson Powell, eclectic journalist, acclaimed poet and all-embracing matriarch, died Thursday, October 10, 2024 at her longtime home in Dilworth. She had lung cancer. She was 83.

Over four decades at the Charlotte Observer, Dannye Romine Powell — her byline — was book editor, restaurant critic and local-front columnist.

Her incisive Q-and-A’s with such authors as Walker Percy, Maya Angelou and Eudora Welty were collected in her “Parting the Curtains: Interviews with Southern Writers.” She contributed the Charlotte chapter in “John Mariani’s Coast to Coast Dining Guide.” As local columnist she covered the murder trials of Susan Smith, Michael Peterson and Josh Griffin.

Her predecessor on the local front, the revered Kays Gary, once admitted to an editor that he had underestimated “this woman Romine.” “No tricks. No contrivances. No preachments. Just powerful parables about real people…. More than any other one person Dannye reflects the best in a family newspaper.”

Despite her overflowing clip file she never considered herself a true “newspaper gal,” an admiring designation she bestowed on friends such as Karen Garloch and Pam Kelley. “For a while I couldn’t walk on that side of the newsroom,” she once recalled. “But then [reporter] Ronnie Glassberg told me he liked my hair.”

Her first published poem appeared in the Paris Review in 1974, catching the eye of copy desk chief Luisita Lopez and leading to her hiring as book editor. That was her dream job — everything else she did at the paper she had to be forcefully drafted for. She continued to publish poetry, winning a National Endowment for the Arts grant and residencies at Yaddo and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, which had turned down as too modest her application to wait tables.

“At Every Wedding Someone Stays Home” received the Miller Williams First Book Award from the University of Arkansas Press. She twice won the annual Brockman-Campbell Award for best book of poetry published by a North Carolinian.

She greatly valued both her weekly poetry critique group and the classes she taught at Charlotte Lit and around her dining room table. Her approach was concise: “First you sweeten them up, then you swat them around.” She was once overheard to direct, “Don’t ever bring another exclamation point into this house!”

Dannye was a Miami native, but her heart belonged to Social Circle, Ga., her mother’s hometown. Friends knew her gift for skillful indirection, rooted in the ways of the small-town South, as “Social Circle talk.”

She leaves her never bored husband of 45 years, Lew Powell; sons Benjamin Houston “Hugh” Romine III and Daniel Patrick Romine, both of Charlotte; granddaughters Veronica Taylor Kathleen Romine Haviland of Summerville, S.C., and her husband Cory and Ashley Marie Birle of Clover, S.C., and grandson Benjamin Houston “Townes” Romine IV of Charlotte; and great-granddaughters Rylie Mae Haviland, Cooper Faith Haviland and Charlee Grace Haviland, all of Summerville.

She was deeply grateful for the end-of-life counsel and advocacy of Alyssa Romine and Dr. Gloria Tsan.

Funeral services will be at Myers Park Baptist Church at 1 p.m. Thursday, October 17, 2024.

Memorials in Dannye’s name may be made to Crisis Assistance Ministry, 500-A Spratt St., Charlotte NC 28206 or to Charlotte Center for Literary Arts, PO Box 18607, Charlotte NC 28218.

Arrangements are in the care of Kenneth W. Poe Funeral & Cremation Service, 1321 Berkeley Avenue, Charlotte, NC 28204, (704) 641-7606. Online condolences can be shared at kennethpoeservices.com.