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.

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Kelly Harris-DeBerry

Kelly Harris-DeBerry received her MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass. She has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and Cave Canem. Some of her publishing credits include: 400yrs: The story of Black people in poems written from love 1619–2019, Words Beats & Life The Global Journal of Hip Hop, Angles in the Wilderness: Young and Black in New Orleans and Beyond, Torch Literary Magazine, The National Parks Service Centennial Commemoration publication with Sonia Sanchez, Yale University's Caduceus Journal, Southern Review, Say it Loud: Poems for James Brown and many more.…

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Kelly Harris-DeBerry received her MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass. She has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and Cave Canem. Some of her publishing credits include: 400yrs: The story of Black people in poems written from love 1619–2019, Words Beats & Life The Global Journal of Hip Hop, Angles in the Wilderness: Young and Black in New Orleans and Beyond, Torch Literary Magazine, The National Parks Service Centennial Commemoration publication with Sonia Sanchez, Yale University’s Caduceus Journal, Southern Review, Say it Loud: Poems for James Brown and many more.

Her podcast episode for About Place Journal called Congo Square: Sustaining the Sacred Post-Katrina highlights her talents as a producer and researcher. Kelly is a former guest poetry editor for Bayou Magazine at the University of New Orleans. She serves her literary community as the New Orleans Poets & Writers’ Literary Coordinator and on various community boards.​ Kelly is a cultural leader with business savvy.

Photo of Megan Hart

Megan Hart

Megan Hart writes books. Some of them use bad words, but most of the other words are okay. Some of them hit bestseller lists and win awards and some don’t, but that’s the way it goes. She can't live without music, the internet, or the ocean, but she and soda have achieved an amicable uncoupling. She loathes the feeling of corduroy or velvet, and modern art leaves her cold.…Read More

Megan Hart writes books. Some of them use bad words, but most of the other words are okay. Some of them hit bestseller lists and win awards and some don’t, but that’s the way it goes. She can’t live without music, the internet, or the ocean, but she and soda have achieved an amicable uncoupling. She loathes the feeling of corduroy or velvet, and modern art leaves her cold. She writes a little bit of everything from horror to romance, though she’s best known for writing steamy fiction that sometimes makes you cry. Find out more about her at meganhart.com, or if you really want to get crazy, follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/megan_hart and Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/readinbed.

Photo of David Hassler

David Hassler

David Hassler, MFA directs the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. In 2009, he cofounded Traveling Stanzas, a community arts project which creates illustrations in response to poems generated from community workshops in schools, healthcare facilities, libraries, senior centers, and veterans’ organizations. Hassler is the author or editor of ten books of poetry and nonfiction, including Dear Vaccine: Global Voices Speak to the Pandemic; Growing Season: The Life of a Migrant Community; and Speak a Powerful Magic: Ten Years of the Traveling Stanzas Poetry Project.…Read More

David Hassler, MFA directs the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. In 2009, he cofounded Traveling Stanzas, a community arts project which creates illustrations in response to poems generated from community workshops in schools, healthcare facilities, libraries, senior centers, and veterans’ organizations. Hassler is the author or editor of ten books of poetry and nonfiction, including Dear Vaccine: Global Voices Speak to the Pandemic; Growing Season: The Life of a Migrant Community; and Speak a Powerful Magic: Ten Years of the Traveling Stanzas Poetry Project. His play, May 4th Voices: Kent State, 1970, based on the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project, was published by The Kent State University Press along with a Teacher’s Resource Book and was produced in 2020 as a national radio play by the WKSU NPR station. Hassler’s awards include Ohio Poet of the Year, the Ohioana Book Award, and the Carter G. Woodson Honor Book Award. His TEDx talk, “The Conversation of Poetry,” conveys the power of poetry to strengthen communities. In addition to his creative writing publications, he has co-authored articles on poetry, technology, and healing in the Journal of Palliative Medicine, the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, and the Online Journal of Issues in Nursing.

Photo of Anastasia Hastings

Anastasia Hastings

Anastasia Hastings is from Brecksville, Ohio. Her newest release is book #2 of the Dear Miss Hermione historical mystery series, Of Hoaxes and Homicide. Publishers Weekly called the book "captivating" and gave it a starred review. The first book of the series, Of Manners and Murder” has been praised by The Wall Street Journal as evoking “…the shocking revelations of Wilkie Collins, the social acuity of Janes Austen and the comic melodrama of Oscar Wilde.” Learn more at: https://www.mystery-book-series.com/.Read More

Anastasia Hastings is from Brecksville, Ohio. Her newest release is book #2 of the Dear Miss Hermione historical mystery series, Of Hoaxes and Homicide. Publishers Weekly called the book “captivating” and gave it a starred review. The first book of the series, Of Manners and Murder” has been praised by The Wall Street Journal as evoking “…the shocking revelations of Wilkie Collins, the social acuity of Janes Austen and the comic melodrama of Oscar Wilde.” Learn more at: https://www.mystery-book-series.com/.

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Sharon Hatfield

About Sharon Hatfield     Sharon Hatfield grew up loving Nancy Drew mysteries and listening to her grandmother read Grimm’s Fairy Tales aloud. Years later, she’s still interested in mysteries of various kinds, which has influenced her choice of nonfiction book topics. Her newest book, Enchanted Ground: The Spirit Room of Jonathan Koons, was published by Ohio University Press in October 2018.…Read More

About Sharon Hatfield

 

 

Sharon Hatfield grew up loving Nancy Drew mysteries and listening to her grandmother read Grimm’s Fairy Tales aloud. Years later, she’s still interested in mysteries of various kinds, which has influenced her choice of nonfiction book topics. Her newest book, Enchanted Ground: The Spirit Room of Jonathan Koons, was published by Ohio University Press in October 2018.

 

A native of Ewing, Virginia, she began writing poems and stories at an early age. After earning undergraduate degrees in English and biology at Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee, she became a newspaper reporter in Virginia. Sharon moved to Ohio in 1985 and later earned a master’s degree in journalism from Ohio University and an MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College in Maryland. She has worked as a reporter, editor, English professor and manuscript consultant.

 

Sharon has twice received an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, most recently in spring 2018 for her work on Enchanted Ground. Her previous book Never Seen the Moon: The Trials of Edith Maxwell won the Weatherford and Chaffin awards for nonfiction.

 

She has served as a panelist for the Kentucky Arts Council and on the faculty of the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop in Hindman, Kentucky, and the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival in Harrogate, Tennessee. In her adopted hometown of Athens, Ohio, she is a member of the Southeast Ohio History Center and is active in environmental work. She also volunteers as an adviser to the Jenco Fund of the Foundation for Appalachian Ohio, an endowment that supports visionary leadership in the region.

 

 

 

 

About the Book

 

 

Enchanted Ground addresses spiritualism as a 19th-century religious movement and explains the place of Jonathan Koons and his family within it. The movement began in western New York in 1848 and extended into the cities and rural communities of the Midwest. Curious visitors travelled from as far as New Orleans to Athens County, Ohio, to a remote country cabin whose marvels would rival any of P. T. Barnum’s attractions. People dressed in homespun crowded in with those in city attire to experience what spiritualist Jonathan Koons and his son Nahum would demonstrate in the pitch dark of the log cabin night after night.

 

 

Jonathan Koons was considered one of the most impressive physical mediums of the 1850s. His Athens County “spirit room,” built specifically for theatrical-style séances, was known for a musical “angel band” that allegedly played along as Jonathan fiddled. On some evenings the audience was also treated to the appearance of spectral hands that scribbled messages on sheets of paper. Today Koons is considered by historians of religion to be the innovator of the trumpet used for voice communication in séances. Replicas of his famed spirit room were built in Ohio, Indiana, Massachusetts and beyond. Hatfield’s Enchanted Ground is not only a portrait of a charismatic medium, but the story of a countercultural force that shook American religion in the 19th-century.

 

 

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Kathryn Haueisen

Kathryn Haueisen loves to meet fascinating people and write articles and books about them. Sometimes she lets her imagination run wild and writes short stories about imaginary people, loosely based on people she’s met. She’s published seven books, both non-fiction and fiction. Her most recent books are historical novels about the famous Mayflower voyage, the 17th century issues in Europe that led to the voyage, and the first encounters between the New England settlers and the Indigenous peoples.…Read More

Kathryn Haueisen loves to meet fascinating people and write articles and books about them. Sometimes she lets her imagination run wild and writes short stories about imaginary people, loosely based on people she’s met. She’s published seven books, both non-fiction and fiction. Her most recent books are historical novels about the famous Mayflower voyage, the 17th century issues in Europe that led to the voyage, and the first encounters between the New England settlers and the Indigenous peoples. She has published dozens of articles in assorted faith-based and consumer publications. Since retiring from active ministry as an ordained Protestant pastor she has been focusing on writing regular blogs and a monthly newsletter at http://www.howwisethen.com.

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Stephen Haven

Stephen Haven is the author of The Last Sacred Place in North America, selected by T.R. Hummer as winner of the 2010 New American Press Poetry Prize. He has published two previous collections of poetry, Dust and Bread, for which he was named 2009 Ohio Poet of the Year, and The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks.…Read More

Stephen Haven is the author of The Last Sacred Place in North America, selected by T.R. Hummer as winner of the 2010 New American Press Poetry Prize. He has published two previous collections of poetry, Dust and Bread, for which he was named 2009 Ohio Poet of the Year, and The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks. He is also author of the memoir The River Lock: One Boy’s Life Along the Mohawk. He has a Ph.D. in American Civilization from New York University and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa. His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, American Poetry Review, Parnassus, Literary Imagination, Crazyhorse, Guernica, Salmagundi, Northwest Review, Image, Western Humanities Review, World Literature (Beijing), and in many other journals. He is Director of the Ashland University MFA Program in Poetry and Creative Nonfiction in Ashland, Ohio, and Director of the Ashland Poetry Press.

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Richard Hawley

Richard Hawley grew up in Arlington Heights, Illinois, before attending Middlebury College, where he completed his B.A. in political science. He went on to graduate studies at Case Western Reserve University, where he earned an M.S. in Management Science and a Ph.D. in political philosophy. He also studied theology for a year at St. John’s College, Cambridge University, as an M.A.…Read More

Richard Hawley grew up in Arlington Heights, Illinois, before attending Middlebury College, where he completed his B.A. in political science. He went on to graduate studies at Case Western Reserve University, where he earned an M.S. in Management Science and a Ph.D. in political philosophy. He also studied theology for a year at St. John’s College, Cambridge University, as an M.A. research student under the tutelage of the theologian W. Norman Pittenger. From 1968 until his retirement in 2005, he was a teacher, administrator, and finally Headmaster at Cleveland’s University School, an independent college preparatory school for boys. In 1995 he was named the founding president of the International Boys Schools Coalition. A writer of fiction, poetry, and literary non-fiction, Hawley has published more than twenty books and several monographs. His essays, articles and poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, American Film, Commonweal, America, Orion, and The Christian Science Monitor and is represented in many literary anthologies. Hawley lives with his wife in Ripton, Vermont and is online at http://www.richardalanhawley.com/.

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Christine Hayes

Christine Hayes spent her childhood in Columbus restaurants while her father gathered tidbits for his Columbus Citizen-Journal columns. She published a book of these columns, The Ben Hayes Scrapbook. Today Christine assists in the Acorn Bookshop in Grandview, writes a column for the Short North Gazette, and as Ramona Moon makes art cars and collage/assemblage.…Read More

Christine Hayes spent her childhood in Columbus restaurants while her father gathered tidbits for his Columbus Citizen-Journal columns. She published a book of these columns, The Ben Hayes Scrapbook. Today Christine assists in the Acorn Bookshop in Grandview, writes a column for the Short North Gazette, and as Ramona Moon makes art cars and collage/assemblage. She graduated from UC Irvine in theatre, taught Montessori school, and lived in San Francisco for 27 years before returning to Columbus.

Photo of Sherri Hayes

Sherri Hayes

Sherri spent most of her childhood detesting English class. It was one of her least favorite subjects because she never seemed to fit into the standard mold. She wasn't good at spelling, or following grammar rules, and outlines made her head spin. For that reason, Sherri never imagined becoming an author. At the age of thirty, all of that changed.…Read More

Sherri spent most of her childhood detesting English class. It was one of her least favorite subjects because she never seemed to fit into the standard mold. She wasn’t good at spelling, or following grammar rules, and outlines made her head spin. For that reason, Sherri never imagined becoming an author. At the age of thirty, all of that changed. After getting frustrated with the direction a television show was taking two of its characters, Sherri decided to try her hand at writing an alternate ending, and give the characters their happily ever after. By the time the story finished, it was one of the top ten read stories on the site, and her readers were encouraging her to write more.

Writing has become a creative outlet that allows her to explore a wide range of emotions, while having fun taking her characters through all the twists and turns she can create.