About Leslie

Leslie K. Bennett edited and published Happenings, an award-winning Ventura County magazine, for more than twenty years.

In its pages she covered the things that shape a community when nobody's watching: environmental issues, education, domestic violence, the unhoused, and the small civic stories that don't make bigger papers. Twenty years of that kind of reporting taught her something about why people land where they land.

How the novel came to be

During the COVID-19 lockdown, Leslie finally had time for a book she'd been carrying around for years. The spark, she says, was an offhand remark on a beach bike ride: a friend, watching the unhoused population of Los Angeles, dismissed them in a single sentence as "drug addicts and alcoholics." Leslie knew that wasn't true.

Peaks & Valleys is her answer — a novel about the many reasons people end up without a home, told through a handful of intersecting lives in one Southern California town. It is fiction. It is also, in another sense, twenty years of reporting that finally found the shape it wanted.

Speaking & book clubs

Leslie is available for library readings, book-club visits (in person or by video), and event appearances. If your group is reading Peaks & Valleys, she'll happily join for the Q&A.