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!
Cindy Thomson
Known for the inspirational Celtic theme employed in most of her books, Cindy Thomson is the author of six novels and three non-fiction books, including her newest Celtic Son. A genealogy enthusiast, she writes from her home in Ohio where she lives with her husband Tom near their three grown sons and their families. Visit her online at http://www.cindyswriting.com
John Thorndike
John Thorndike grew up in New England, graduated from Harvard, took an MA from Columbia, then lit out for Latin America. He spent two years in the Peace Corps in El Salvador and two, with his wife and child, on a backcountry farm in Chile. Eventually he settled with his son in Athens, Ohio, where for ten years his day job was farming. Then it was construction. His first two books were novels, followed by a memoir, Another Way Home, about his wife’s schizophrenia and his life as a single parent (“The directness, the honesty, the terrible plain chant of the narrative stunned me.”—Doris Grumbach.) A second memoir, The Last of His Mind, describes his father’s year-long descent into Alzheimer’s, and was a Washington Post Best Book of 2009. The novel A Hundred Fires in Cuba follows an affair between a young American photographer and one of the heroes of the Cuban Revolution, Camilo Cienfuegos. The World Against Her Skin, Thorndike’s latest book, is a half-fictional evocation of his mother’s life.
Melanie Tienter
Melanie Tienter
is a commercial photographer based in southeast Ohio.
She enjoys oil painting, hanging with her family and her cats, and eating delicious
food.
Ann Townsend
Ann Townsend is the author of Dime Store Erotics (Silverfish Review Press, 1998) and The Coronary Garden (Sarabande Books, 2005). She is an editor, with David Baker, of a collection of essays, Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry (Graywolf Press, 2007), and is currently at work on a collection of essays on poetry, translation, and the natural world. Her poetry and essays have appeared in such magazines as Poetry, Paris Review, The Nation, Kenyon Review, and many others. The recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council, she has also received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Bernheim Arboretum, and the Lannan Foundation. She is the cofounder of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. In 2016 she, along with cofounders Cate Marvin and Erin Belieu, accepted the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, given in recognition of their work for the larger literary community. A professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, Ann Townsend hybridizes modern daylilies at Bittersweet Farm.
Scott Tracey
Scott Tracey lives just outside of Cleveland in Sheffield, Ohio. He is the author of Moonset and the Witch Eyes trilogy with Flux.
Read MoreScott Tracey lives just outside of Cleveland in Sheffield, Ohio. He is the author of Moonset and the Witch Eyes trilogy with Flux.
Otis Trotter
Otis Trotter lives in North Canton, Ohio. He never really planned to be a writer, but by late 2011, he succumbed to a calling that he’d had since his forties, and started writing a book about his life experiences and his large, unique family in a small Ohio town. Otis is a graduate of Central State University, Wilberforce, Ohio with a bachelor’s of science in Psychology. In 2009, he retired after 30 years of service with the Stark County Board of Developmental Disabilities. Currently, he is an Independent Provider for the Ohio Department of Developmental Disabilities.
Connie Remlinger Trounstine
Connie Remlinger Trounstine grew up in Delphos, Ohio and is a graduate of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA. She worked as an editorial assistant for Writer’s Market in Cincinnati until joining The Kentucky Post, a Scripps Howard newspaper, where she was a reporter for 29 years. She is the author of the children’s chapter book The Worst Christmas Ever and Fingerprints on the Table, a picture book about a table in the White House used to sign peace treaties. Her book The Phantom Five is a book for middle-grade students about life at home during World War II. She lives in Cincinnati.
Samantha Tucker
Samantha Tucker (she/her) is an antiracist teacher, writer, and editor in Columbus, Ohio. Sam writes personal essays, memoir, and cultural critique, having earned her MFA and MA in creative nonfiction. Her essay “Fountain Girls,” originally published in Ecotone, is a listed notable in Best American Essays 2017 and is anthologized in Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: An Anthology. Other essays have been published with Literary Hub, Columbus Alive, BUST, Brevity, and Guernica. Her latest book, Collective Chaos: A Roller Derby Team Memoir, was written with co-author Amy Spears. Learn more at: https://www.theamericandreamstartshere.com/
Paula Stone Tucker
Paula Stone Tucker was a witness to the May 4, 1970 shootings at Kent State University. A retired clinical psychologist, she worked with families, couples, and survivors of trauma and abuse. In her younger days she was a reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal and the Daily Kent Stater. She grew up in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio and graduated from Kent State University. She splits her time between northeast Ohio and The Villages, Florida where she writes, plays the flute and is learning to play golf. Her first book, Surviving: A Kent State Memoir, won the Silver Medal at the Florida Writers Association Royal Palm Literary Award Competition in 2019. She is available for interviews. You can contact her at paulastonetucker.com or on Facebook at Paula Stone Tucker, Author. She looks forward to hearing from you and reading your reviews.