Bill Benners

Encouraged by a fourth grade school teacher he recalls only as “Miss Finch,” he envisioned himself to be a man on the way to becoming a novelist since the 1950s. But the path to realizing his destiny was ill-defined taking him down many side roads, including a thirty-year stint of writing, producing, acting, and directing for radio, television, film, and the stage (which included directing such character-driven dramas as The Glass Menagerie, The Little Foxes, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and I’ll Be Back Before Midnight.)

After a short run of minor acting roles in the early 1980s in films with Sissy Spacek, Morgan Freeman, Keith Szarabajka, Mickey Rourke, and Caroline Kava, Bill took on what he considers one of his finest roles, the voice of Sith, the evil antagonist in Clan Phantasm’s classic machinima film, Devil’s Covenant.

Finally, realizing directing, acting, and producing were keeping him from his ultimate goal, he left the theatre in the late 1990s to focus on writing that first novel. Eight years later, the suspense thriller My Sister's Keeper was published and has sold more than 400,000 copies.

Following the release of that first novel, he was again sidetracked by directing the two-hour documentary film, The Embers, The Heart and Soul of Beach Music, which was released in 2014.

He lives in coastal North Carolina with his wife Dorrie, two Maltese-Yorkies who think they own the block, and two cats that think they own the house. He has two adult children, Natalie and Lucas, and one grandchild, Gavin.

Bill now spends most of his time hidden away in an upstairs back room working on his second novel that he hopes to have out by the spring of 2016.