Planets align for local author and her agent

North Carolina’s own Kristy Woodson Harvey has been termed a “shooting star” – a book author who has burst forth and risen into the stratosphere of the literary world.

One member of the launch team who has been at Harvey’s side for the ride is Kathie Bennett, another Southern spirit, who hails from Panama City, Fla. She’s a certified “author advocate.”

Kristy Harvey, a native of Salisbury, now calls Beaufort home. She affectionately refers to “Agent Bennett” as her “fairy book mother.”

They laugh and bless each other’s heart, for they are connected by their “Southerness,” their love of reading and their passion for books. Each has a father who served as his respective city’s mayor. (Isn’t that dagnabbitly ironic?)

Val Schoger, publisher of Panama City Living Magazine, wrote: “When Kathie reminisces about her love for books, it is her grandmother, Katherine Wells, she thinks about.”

“Her fondest childhood memories are of summers spent in the small library her grandmother founded in the 1960s” in Blountstown, Fla., on the second floor of the local Piggly Wiggly grocery store, Schoger said.

Laura J. Perricone, writing for GoUpstate.com, in Spartanburg, S.C., said Kathie Clemons Bennett’s “love for literature was sparked at an early age.” Kathie graduated from Sewanee: The University of the South (in Sewanee, Tenn.), majoring in English.

Bennett spent 35 years working with Delta Airlines as a flight attendant, but her flight plan changed course in 2008, when she founded Magic Time Literary Publicity in Spartanburg.

Essentially, Bennett and her team are focused on introducing book authors to a wide audience of readers, and generating “over-the-top book sales” as a result.

“Building audience is all about making friends in the book world,” Bennett explained, “with other authors, readers and booksellers.”

Bennett’s company currently represents about 40 active authors, and she includes Kristy Harvey within the group of “featured authors” who are hot-hot-hot. A prominent photo on the company’s website shows Bennett with Harvey and fellow author Mary Alice Monroe.

Bennett said her firm specializes in arranging author tours that are longer than most publisher-designed tours. “Our tours almost always involve 15 to 20 presentations or keynotes in book clubs, civic clubs, nonprofit organizations and in the academic and bookstore arena,” she told Perricone.

Hence, Bennett’s authors need to be physically fit to endure countless opportunities to form friendships with as many people as possible while on the road. Harvey is clearly among the most “hale and hearty” of the lot. Her energy is boundless.

Bennett confessed that her favorite book tour stop is Panama City. She said: “I love bringing my authors home!”

That old library room above the grocery store in Blountstown was the venue where Bennett introduced America to author Karen Spears Zacharias. Her book “Will Jesus Buy Me a Doublewide?” came out in 2010.

“We had great press; sold 60 books and raised money for literacy projects my grandmother began,” Bennett told Perricone.

Bennett tells of the time she brought author Pat Conroy of Beaufort, S.C., to Panama City in 2014, and “put him up” at her father’s house. Pat Conroy and Gerry Clemons “got along marvelously,” Bennett said.

Conroy “absolutely loved Panama City. His second visit was Pat’s idea, and he insisted on staying in my father’s home.”

Conroy died from pancreatic cancer in 2016. Bennett continues to represent his widow, author Cassandra King Conroy. Today, Cassandra and Kathie are the dearest of friends, Perricone reported.

Bennett named her company Magic Time Literary Publicity in memory of another great Southerner and close friend – the late Doug Marlette of Greensboro, N.C.

Marlette was a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist (1988) and the creator of the “Kudzu” syndicated comic strip. He was 57 when he died in a car crash in 2007. His second novel, “Magic Time,” was published in 2006.

The principal eulogist at Marlette’s service in Hurdle Mills, N.C., was Pat Conroy. He reportedly said, “The first person to cry, when he heard about Doug’s death, was God.”