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!
Leah Stewart
Leah Stewart is the author of the novels Body of a Girl, The Myth of You and Me, Husband and Wife, The History of Us, and The New Neighbor. The daughter of an Air Force officer and an elementary school teacher, she lived as a child in Virginia, Idaho, England, Kansas, and Virginia again. She went to high school in Clovis, New Mexico (a town featured in her second novel, The Myth of You and Me), college at Vanderbilt University, and graduate school at the University of Michigan. Since then, she has lived in Boston and Chapel Hill and held visiting writer positions at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee; Vanderbilt University; and Murray State University in Kentucky. Now a professor at the University of Cincinnati, she lives in Cincinnati with her husband and two children. In 2010, she was the recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship and in 2014 the recipient of a Sachs Fund Prize, given for contributions to Cincinnati arts and culture. Her fourth novel, The History of Us, which is set in Cincinnati, is on the Choose to Read Ohio list for 2015–16. For more, go to leahstewart.com
R.T. Stewart
In the early 1980s, R. T. Stewart was hired by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Division of Wildlife, as a uniformed state wildlife officer. However, the agency soon discovered Stewart had special skills as an undercover officer. Thus began his 18-year career infiltrating poaching rings–often living with poachers for months or even years on end–and eventually bringing the bad guys to justice. The book, Poachers Were My Prey: Eighteen Years as an Undercover Wildlife Officer, is Stewart’s first-hand account of his various, exciting undercover investigations in Ohio, the Midwest, and beyond. Now retired, R. T. Stewart lives in rural southeast Ohio.
Deanne Stillman
Deanne Stillman is a widely published, critically acclaimed writer. Her books include Blood Brothers (Ohioana Book Award winner, starred review, Kirkus; “best of the West 2018,” True West Magazine); Desert Reckoning (winner of the Spur and LA Press Club Awards for nonfiction, an amazon editors pick, based on a Rolling Stone piece), and Mustang, a Los Angeles Times “best book of the year.” In addition, she wrote the cult classic, Twentynine Palms, a Los Angeles Times bestseller that Hunter Thompson called “A strange and brilliant story by an important American writer.” She writes the “Letter from the West” column for the Los Angeles Review of Books and her plays have been produced and won prizes around the country. She’s a member of the core faculty at the UC Riverside-Palm Desert MFA Low Residency Creative Writing Program, where she teaches nonfiction.
https://www.newsweek.com/blood-brothers-sitting-bull-buffalo-bill-book-book-excerpt-674632
https://themillions.com/2017/11/reconciling-americas-original-sin-the-millions-interviews-deanne-stillman.html
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/locked-out-of-time-a-conversation-with-deanne-stillman/
Deanne Stillman
Deanne Stillman is a widely published, critically acclaimed writer. Her latest book is Blood Brothers, praised by Douglas Brinkley as “a landmark achievement in American history,” and recipient of a starred review in Kirkus and named “a best book of the year” by True West and the Millions). She also wrote Desert Reckoning (based on a Rolling Stone piece; it was an amazon editors pick, Spur Award and LA Press Club Award winner, and praised in Newsweek), and Mustang, an LA Times “best book of the year” which helped launch the current conversation about wild horses and burros in America. It’s now available in audio with Anjelica Huston, Frances Fisher, John Densmore, Wendie Malick and Richard Portnow. Additionally, Deanne wrote the cult classic, Twentynine Palms, a Los Angeles Times bestseller that Hunter Thompson called “A strange and brilliant story by an important American writer.” She writes the “Letter from the West” column for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and her work has been published in literary hub, salon, slate, Tin House, the NY Times, LA Times, Orion, Angels Flight – Literary West and elsewhere. Her essays are in many anthologies and her plays have been produced and won prizes around the country. She’s a member of the core faculty at the UC Riverside-Palm Desert MFA Low Residency Creative Writing Program, where she teaches nonfiction.
Deanne Stillman
Deanne Stillman is a widely published, critically acclaimed writer. Her books include Blood Brothers (which received a starred review in Kirkus and appears on several “best of 2017” lists, including two at the millions, and won the 2018 Ohioana Award in nonfiction); Desert Reckoning (winner of the Spur and LA Press Club Awards for nonfiction), and Mustang, a Los Angeles Times “best book of the year.” Mustang is now out in audio with Anjelica Huston, Frances Fisher, Wendie Malick, Richard Portnow, and John Densmore. In addition, she wrote the cult classic, Twentynine Palms, a Los Angeles Times bestseller that Hunter Thompson called “A strange and brilliant story by an important American writer.” She writes the “Letter from the West” column for the Los Angeles Review of Books and is a member of the core faculty at the UC Riverside-Palm Desert MFA Low Residency Creative Writing Program.
Alison Stine
Alison Stine is the author of a novel Supervision, along with three books of poems, most recently Wait. She holds a PhD from Ohio University, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. In 2015, she was awarded an Individual Artist Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Charlotte Stiverson
Charlotte L. Stiverson has been teaching for more than 35 years, working primarily with elementary school students in her hometown of Columbus, Ohio. Stiverson recognized the need to explain chemotherapy in a sensitive, easy to understand way for young children, which was her purpose behind writing Nellie’s Walk.
Her other works include various articles for educational magazines, along with a number of book reviews published for the Ohioana Library. Recently, Stiverson worked closely with students and Ohio legislators to pass a bill, officially making the Adena Pipe Ohio’s State artifact. She’s also active at the Highlands Nature Sanctuary in Bainbridge, Ohio working to create, coordinate, and implement the annual artist in residence program that provides inspiration and immerses local Ohio artists in the scenic landscape of the area. In her free time, Stiverson enjoys arts and crafts like knitting and sewing, hiking the many trails in her area, reading and writing, and doing volunteer work within her local community.
Mary Stockwell
Dr. Mary Stockwell is a writer who has lived most of her life in the twelve-mile-by-twelve-mile square reserve carved out by Anthony Wayne near the mouth of the Maumee River in the Treaty of Greeneville. Her latest book Unlikely General: “Mad” Anthony Wayne and the Battle for America (Yale University Press, 2018) brings to life the man behind the myth of Mad Anthony. She got her love of history from her father who was proud of his Irish heritage and who took his children along remnants of 19th century canals in Ohio reminding them that their ancestors came to this country to build them and for the freedom and opportunity that America promised. She got her love of storytelling from her mother who was an actress, director, acting teacher, and prize-winning poet.
After completing her Ph.D. in American history at the University of Toledo, where she was the last student of W. Eugene Hollon, the noted historian of the American West, she worked as a writer at Detroit Edison’s Fermi II Nuclear Power Plant. The experience taught her how people make decisions in the real world. These insights helped her become a better writer.
In 1996, she was hired as the American History Professor at Lourdes University, and in 2001, she became the Chair of its Department of History, Political Science, and Geography. She won the Faculty Excellence Award for her superior teaching three times at Lourdes University and was nominated by her institution for national teaching awards. She said goodbye to her teaching and administrative career in 2012 to become a full-time writer and to accept the Earhart Foundation Fellowship at the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan. She was also awarded a Gilder-Lehrman Fellowship to study at the New York Public Library.
Mary Stockwell is the author of The Other Trail of Tears: The Removal of the Ohio Indians (Westholme, 2015), a finalist for the Ohio Library Association’s Best Book on Ohio Award in 2016. She has also written history books used by young people throughout the United States including The Ohio Adventure, A Journey through Maine, and Massachusetts, Our Home, the 2005 winner of the Golden Lamp Award from the Association of Educational Publishers for Best Book, as well as The American Story: Perspectives and Encounters to 1865, a college level textbook used by students around the world. She is the author of Woodrow Wilson: The Last Romantic in the First Men: America’s Presidents Series, which has been nominated for the 2018 Dartmouth Medal. Her essays on George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt have appeared in major scholarly studies of these presidents. She has written for the website of George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate. Stockwell’s Interrupted Odyssey: Ulysses S. Grant and the American Indians, the first complete study of Grant’s Indian policy, was published by the Southern Illinois University Press in September 2018.
Myrna Stone
Myrna Stone is the author of four full-length books of poems, the last two of which—In the Present Tense: Portraits of My Father and The Casanova Chronicles—were finalists for the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry. Her first book, The Art of Loss, earned for her the 2001 Ohio Poet of the Year Award. The recipient of two Ohio Arts Council Fellowships and a Vermont Studio Center Full Fellowship, her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in numerous journals such as Poetry, Boulevard, The Massachusetts Review, Black Warrior Review, River Styx, and Nimrod. In 2015, as a faculty member at the Antioch Writers’ Workshop, she conducted the morning class in Poetry. For more information, visit greenvillepoets.org/profiles/mstone
Diane Stortz
Diane Stortz is a multipublished author who writes to make God’s wonders known to the next generation. Her newest children’s releases are Stop-and-Go Devotions: 52 Devotions for Busy Parents and God’s Words to Dream On, both from Tommy Nelson. Diane’s books for women encourage them to know God’s Word, the Bible. Diane and her husband have two married daughters and five young grandchildren—all boys! Visit her at http://www.DianeStortz.com.