Ohio Author Profiles
Ohio has a rich literary heritage as well as some wonderful contemporary authors. Learn more about them here! You can sort by various categories and see who has participated in our annual book festival by using the category search on the left, or search by keyword (including partial author names) by using the search field on the right.
If you would like to know which Ohio authors and illustrators are available for school and library visits or workshops, visit our School & Library Visits page here.
We continue to add authors, so check back soon!
Dara Naraghi
Dara Naraghi was born in Iran and educated in the United States. His graphic novel trilogy Persia Blues has been praised by Publishers Weekly and the Midwest Book Review, has been nominated for awards by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), and won a S.P.A.C.E. Prize for best graphic novel. His other notable graphic novels include the Terminator Salvation official movie prequel, and Witch & Wizard: Battle for Shadowland (both New York Times Bestsellers), as well as works for Image Comics, IDW Publishing, Dark Horse, and DC Comics. Dara is also a founding member of the comic book writers/artists collective known as PANEL, with whom he has produced 20 volumes of their comics anthology. Dara lives in Columbus, Ohio with his wife, daughter, and the world’s sweetest hound dog. Visit him online at http://www.daranaraghi.com/
Samuel Narh
Samuel Narh is an award-winning children’s book author. His books, A Kite for Melia and Milko, were created with co-author Freda Narh. He enjoys painting pictures with words using his stories, which are meant to touch and reach people across the world. Learn more at: https://www.samuelnarh.com/
Elizabeth Neal
Elizabeth Neal is a writer, editor, and digital strategist who lives in Columbus, OH, with her husband, daughter, and two rescue mutts.
Marilyn Nelson
Marilyn Nelson is the author of many award-winning books, including Carver: A Life in Poems, which was a National Book Award finalist, a Newbery Honor Book, and a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and received the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award and the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award. She is also the author of A Wreath for Emmett Till, which garnered the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, a Coretta Scott King Honor, a Printz Honor, and a Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award Honor. She lives in Connecticut. https://marilyn-nelson.com/
Megan Neville
Megan Neville is a writer and educator based in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has appeared in West Branch, Pleiades, Poets.org, Wildness, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. She was the winner of the 2021 Trio award and the 2019 Wick Poetry Center Contest for Peace & Transformation, and has been a finalist or semifinalist for the Write Bloody Book Contest, the Akron Poetry Prize, the Frost Place Chapbook Contest, the Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Contest, the YesYes Books 2020 Open Reading Period, and others. In 2021 received a Best of the Net nomination and two nominations for the Pushcart Prize. Her full-length poetry collection The Fallow is available from Trio House Press. Megan is also an editorial assistant for Split Lip Magazine. Follow her on Twitter @MegNev. Learn more at: https://megannevillepoetry.com/
Judy Carey Nevin
JUDY CAREY NEVIN twice received a fortune from a NYC fortune cookie that read “You are a lover of words. You will someday write a book.” Judy never expected that fortune to come true, but the sale of her debut picture book, WHAT DADDIES LIKE, has sealed her fate. Her sensibilities lean toward texts for the very young, especially preschoolers. Judy works as a library director in Ohio, where she lives with her family. Please visit Judy at: http://www.judycareynevin.com
Mary Newman
Mary A. Newman PhD, is the co-author of Cherry, Edible Flowers: A Global History, and Coconut: A Global History (forthcoming in 2022), with her sister, Constance Kirker. Mary has taught at Ohio University, the University of Malta, and Silpakorn University in Thailand, the latter two as a Fulbright Specialist.
Susie Newman
Susie Newman lives in Westerville, Ohio with her family. Following her lifelong dream of being a writer, Susie finds creative ways to write full-time. She is a licensed wedding and funeral celebrant, and started Simply I Do Ceremonies. Susie inscribes and performs customized ceremonies and personalized memorials. This job allows her to write the real everyday life and love stories and recite it to the ones involved. When Susie wanted to write a book about a haunted cafe, she took a job as a waitress in a cafe & bakery (Mozart’s in Clintonville) and began writing her inspirations and thoughts on a server pad, in-betweeen customers and shifts. What started out as chicken scratches on a waitress tablet is now the novel, Lost Souls Cafe.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Aimee Nezhukumatathil (neh-ZOO / KOO-mah / tah-TILL) is the author of the New York Times best-selling illustrated collection of nature essays and Kirkus Prize finalist, WORLD OF WONDERS: IN PRAISE OF FIREFLIES, WHALE SHARKS, & OTHER ASTONISHMENTS (2020, Milkweed Editions), which was chosen as Barnes and Noble’s Book of the Year. She has four previous poetry collections: OCEANIC (Copper Canyon Press, 2018), LUCKY FISH (2011), AT THE DRIVE-IN VOLCANO (2007), and MIRACLE FRUIT (2003), the last three from Tupelo Press. Her most recent chapbook is LACE & PYRITE, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Tin House.
Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, a Mississippi Arts Council grant, and being named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. In 2021, she became the first-ever poetry editor for SIERRA magazine, the story-telling arm of The Sierra Club. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.