Meet Walter

Walter Bennett is a writer and former lawyer, judge, and law professor living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His first novel, Leaving Tuscaloosa, won The Alabama Author’s Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and the Crook’s Corner Book Prize for debut novels set in the American South. The Last First Kiss , a tender novel set during a hurricane on the Outer Banks, was released in 2021. Walter has published short fiction and essays in both print and online journals, including Blackbird,The Courtland Review, Eclipse and Voices. An essay on trout fishing, “Black Quill,” appears in Astream: American Writers on Fly Fishing (Skyhorse Publishing, Spring 2012). He has written numerous articles on the law; and a highly acclaimed book: The Lawyer’s Myth: Reviving Ideals in the Legal Profession (U. Chicago Press, 2001). He is a native of Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Walter has a new novel coming from Regal House Publishing in December 2026. Read more below about Sayla Is My Name.

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**Sayla Is My Name**

Aramenta Burgwyn, born the privileged daughter of a Southern planter before the Civil War, has long harbored a quiet suspicion: her mother is not white. She believes her mother might be Henrietta, a striking, mixed-race slave. When her father dies, her aunt seizes the estate and Aramenta is sold into slavery.
Renamed Sayla, she must navigate the horrors of bondage and the fractured landscape of the Civil War. Through brutality, betrayal, and unimaginable hardship, Sayla fights for freedom, identity, and dignity, carving a path toward a life she refuses to surrender. Across continents, Julian, her childhood friend and first love, must navigate the tides of war and exile to find her.
*Sayla Is My Name* is a vivid, unflinching tale of courage, resilience, and the struggle to claim one’s humanity in a world determined to deny it.
***Sayla Is My Name*** is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing in Raleigh NC. Preorders available.

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Praise for Sayla Is My Name

“As a lifelong writer, teacher, and critic of Southern literature myself, I came to this novel with a great deal of background, interest, and some doubt. What’s left to say? A lot, I’ll tell you! Sayla Is My Name is an historical novel unlike any other that I have ever read in its extraordinary immersion in all the details of time and place, thereby avoiding stereotypes and making the characters come to astonishing life, Black and white alike, horribly or beautifully, yet always memorably. The reader is totally THERE, immersed in time, place, personalities and the action of the story. Sayla’s complex journey through slavery and its aftermath is one which I literally could not put down, finding surprise (or love, understanding, horror, or enlightenment) on every page.”

— Lee Smith, author of On Agate Hill and The Last Girls

“Walter Bennett’s new novel is at once compelling and shockingly new in its portrayal of the facts of slavery. No one, in my knowledge, has been able to show how the life of a human being of mixed race could invoke the fury of this era. The book is filled with terrific story-telling, drama, scale, and a sure, keen morality you can trust. It is written with a fearless voice and bravery, a keen sense of right and wrong, and with the stature equal to the task. At once dramatic, moving and unforgettable.”

— Craig Nova, author of The Good Son and The Last Sweet Taste

“This novel joins a very small group of recent American books that help contemporary readers better understand the chaos, calamity, and cruelty of the U.S. Civil War and its aftermath. Walter Bennett’s Sayla Is My Name easily stands as a peer with Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, and Erik Larson’s Demon of Unrest. In Bennett’s sensitive and able hands this gripping story of rape, disfigurement, and shattering trauma rings true with astonishing historical detail and page-turning power.”

— Georgann Eubanks, author of The Fabulous Ordinary and Literary Trails of North Carolina

“Award-winning novelist Walter Bennett takes on a subject worthy of Faulkner: What happens when the light-skinned, mixed-race daughter of a white man, raised and educated as his own, is captured and sold into slavery? …Ultimately, this journey becomes a spiritual call for one young woman to burn her white self to ashes, to survive and rise as fully human only by becoming Black. I read this riveting tale long into the night, cheering Aramenta and her lover on through their life-or-death struggles. Bennett sings this difficult journey with the accuracy and language of an epic poet; this is an American odyssey newly sung.”

— Marjorie Hudson, author of Indigo Fields and Searching for Virginia Dare

“A riveting story, original in its conception and beautifully told, a new and deeper understanding of our country's greatest moral issue. An amazing achievement.”