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!
Jonathan Knight
Jonathan Knight has written nine books on Cleveland sports. Called “one of the most articulate and devoted sportswriters in Ohio” by the Akron Beacon Journal, Knight has been praised by the Plain Dealer, Cleveland Scene, Cleveland Magazine, and ESPN’s Grantland.com. He’s a graduate of Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism and a member of the Society for American Baseball Research. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his two sons. You can learn more at http://www.jknightbooks.com and follow him on Twitter at @jknightwriter.
Brenda Knight
Ohio native Brenda Knight began her career at HarperCollins, working with luminaries Paolo Coelho, Marianne Williamson, and Huston Smith. Knight was awarded IndieFab’s Publisher of the Year in 2014 at the American Library Association. Knight is the author of Wild Women and Books, The Grateful Table, Be a Good in the World, Random Acts of Kindness, and Women of the Beat Generation, which won an American Book Award. Knight also cocreated You Should Be Writing: A Journal of Inspiration and Instruction to Keep Your Pen Moving with Nita Sweeney (Depression Hates a Moving Target.) Knight is a poet, writer, and editor. She is currently the Associate Publisher for Mango Publishing; she also served as President of the Women’s National Book Association, San Francisco Chapter, and is an instructor at the annual San Francisco Writers Conference, Central Coast Writers Conference, and wherever she can be with fellow writers. She resides in San Francisco, CA.
Kip Knott
Jeff Knowles
Jeff Knowles was born in Cleveland in 1948 at the front edge of the Baby Boom generation. At age five, his family moved to Northfield—exactly half way between Cleveland and Akron and in the middle of the Cuyahoga River Valley that is at the heart of his book. Despite undergraduate and graduate degrees in history, he did not come to fully appreciate the historic and cultural significance of his home place until middle age. He retired in 2004 after a thirty-year research career in criminal justice, the last twenty-eight of which were served as Director of the Ohio Statistical Analysis Center in the Office of Criminal Justice Services. His written works have included two books, What of the Night? and Integrity with Two Eye, as well as articles for Ohio Magazine, Cincinnati Magazine, and several others.
Knowles and his wife of forty-six years, Lezlee, have three children: Kathi, Kimberly and Mark, and six grandchildren: Aaron, Andrew, Emma, Kate, Jack and Matthew. A diverse group of places have served as his homes, including Cleveland, Northfield, Carter County, Tennessee, Atlanta, Georgia and—for the past forty years, Columbus, Ohio.
Jen Knox
An Ohio-born writer, Jen Knox’s fiction appears in The Best Small Fictions 2017 (Braddock Avenue
Books), The Adirondack Review, Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row, Chicago Quarterly Review,
Cosmonauts Avenue, Fiction Southeast, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Saturday Evening
Post, The Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly, NPR, Crannog, and Fairlight Shorts. She is the author
of After the Gazebo (NYC, New York: Rain Mountain Press) and The Glass City, which won the
2016 Prize Americana for Prose (Hollywood Books International). Jen earned her BA from
Otterbein University and her MFA from Bennington. She works as a writing coach and
lecturer. jenknox.com
Christine Kohler
An Ohio native, Christine (Rhodeback) Kohler is the author of 17 nonfiction and fiction books for children and teens. A graduate of the University of Hawaii, she lived in Japan and Guam, the setting for her debut novel NO SURRENDER SOLDIER (Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster). She is also published in educational books, articles, poetry and photography.…
Read MoreAn Ohio native, Christine (Rhodeback) Kohler is the author of 17 nonfiction and fiction books for children and teens. A graduate of the University of Hawaii, she lived in Japan and Guam, the setting for her debut novel NO SURRENDER SOLDIER (Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster). She is also published in educational books, articles, poetry and photography.
Kohler now lives in Texas with her husband, whom she met at Kent State University. Contact her at ckohler@christinekohlerbooks.com ; website http://www.christinekohlerbooks.com/ ; facebook https://www.facebook.com/ChristineKohlerbooks/ ; twitter https://twitter.com/christinekohle1
Wendy Koile
Wendy Koile has spent every summer of her life vacationing on the shores of Lake Erie, a family tradition spanning over 75 years. Inspired by her love and appreciation for the lake, Wendy recently wrote and had published a third book concerning the region entitled, Disasters of Ohio’s Lake Erie Islands. The book features stories of hardships on the island including storms, fires, lost islands, and even an unsolved murder.
When Wendy is not writing, she stays very busy as a full-time faculty member at Zane State College where she teaches Developmental English. She also enjoys road trips across Ohio with her twelve-year-old daughter.
Leonard Kress
Leonard Kress grew up in and around Philadelphia and studied religion at Temple University (BA), Slavic Literature and Folklore at Indiana University and the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and Poetry at Columbia University (MFA). He has published 8 collections of poetry, most recently The Orpheus Complex (Main Street Rag, 2009), Thirteens (Aureole Press, 2010), Braids & Other Sestinas (Seven Kitchens Press, 20110, and Living in the Candy Store (Finishing Line Press, 2011).
He has also completed a new verse translation of the 19th century, Romantic epic, Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz. Poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and translations from Polish have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Massachusetts Review, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, Crab Orchard Review, etc. He has been awarded grants in poetry and playwriting from the Ohio Arts Council and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and was the invited American poet to the Warsaw Autumn of Poetry in 2006.
Kress currently teaches philosophy, religion and creative writing at Owens College in northwest Ohio.
Trudy Krisher
Trudy Krisher is an award-winning author of young adult novels, children’s picture books, and a scholarly biography. Her recent biography, Fanny Seward: A Life, won a Silver Medal from the Independent Publishers Association. Awards for her historical novels for young adults include the International Reading Association Award, a Jefferson Cup Honor Award, the American Library Association Best Books award, and many others. She has spoken at many local, regional, and national forums including the American Library Association, The National Conference of Teachers of English, and the New York Public Library. She is a retired professor from the Department of Liberal Arts, Communication, and Social Sciences at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio. She currently hosts a public access television show in Dayton, Ohio called “The Writer’s Nook.” She has been featured as part of the Dayton region’s PBS-TV initiative “The Great American Read.” You can learn more about her at http://www.trudykrisherauthor.com.
Education: B.A., College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia
M.Ed., College of New Jersey, Trenton, New Jersey
Selected Publications:
Bark Park. Children’s Picture Book. Simon & Schuster/Beach Lane Books, 2019.
Fanny Seward: A Life. Biography. Syracuse University Press. 2015.
“An Affectionate Farewell”: The Story of Old Bob and Old Abe. Children’s picture book. Bunker Hill Publishing. 2015.
Fallout: A Novel. Young Adult Novel. New York: Holiday House. 2006.
Uncommon Faith: A Novel. Young Adult Novel. New York: Holiday House. 2003.
“We Loved Lucy.” Short Story solicited for Time Capsule: Short Stories about Teenagers throughout the Twentieth Century, edited by Don Gallo, New York, Delacorte Press, 1999. Laurel Leaf paperback released through Bantam Doubleday Dell, New York, 2001.
Kinship: A Novel. Young Adult Novel. Random House. 1997. Laurel Leaf paperback released through Bantam Doubleday Dell, New York, 1999. Audio recording from Recorded Books, 2001.
Writing for a Reader: Peers, Process, and Progress in the Writing Classroom. College Writing Textbook. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. 1994.
Spite Fences: A Novel. Young Adult Novel. New York: Delacorte. 1994. Norwegian rights acquired by Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1997. Laurel Leaf paperback released through Bantam Doubleday Dell, New York, 1996. Audio recording from Recorded Books, 2000.
Kathy’s Hats: A Story of Hope. Children’s Picture Book. Chicago: Albert Whitman & Company, 1992. Japanese rights acquired by Hyoronsha, Tokyo, Japan, 1997.
The Writer’s Image: Literary Photographs by Jill Krementz. Introduction by Kurt Vonnegut. Preface by Trudy Krisher. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.