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.
Michael Neno
Columbus native Michael Neno has been writing, drawing, and publishing comic books, coloring books, zines, and minicomics for over thirty-five years. Michael has written (and also drawn) for Cracked Magazine, Caliber Comics, Ohio’s Amazing Montage Press, Silver Comics, Columbus’ Weinland Park Stories anthology, contributed to a comics anthology on Washington, D.C. history, ReDistricted, written and drawn projects for Columbus’ Wild Goose Creative, and written about Columbus history in The Columbus Scribbler.
Among the books and publications he’s published are two issues of The Signifiers, the minicomics Michael Neno’s Dream, Michael Neno’s Life-Changing Guide to Decluttering Your Comic Book Collection, What to Do When Approached by a Creepy Clown and The Toy Box. He’s also written two issues of the music review zine, Abba Zab and wrote/published a set of ten public domain mashup microcomics during the pandemic.
Along with creating graphic designs for concert posters, album covers, illustrating magazines, children’s books and freelance lettering, penciling, inking and coloring for various publishers,
he also regularly writes reviews for the website: Film Review Central.
Among the awards he has won are the Governor’s Award of Excellence in 1980 for the painting The Visit and a 2022 SPACE (Small Press and Alternative Comics Expo) Lifetime Achievement Award. He also received a Xeric Grant from Peter Laird (co-creator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) for the publication of his comic book Reactionary Tales in 2001. The book featured an introduction written and drawn by Ohio-born cartoonist Paul Pope (Batman Year 100).
Jay Nesbit
Jay grew up in University Heights, Ohio, and has also lived in Detroit, Michigan and North Padre Island, Texas. He received a pharmacy degree from The Ohio State University, and an MBA from Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi. He is married with two adult children and two grandchildren. Jay was Clinical Assistant Professor of Pharmacy Practice for Northeast Ohio Medical University. An entrepreneur, he owned a pharmacy, a travel magazine, and a trophy & awards business. He has also been a real estate investor, and owns several investment homes and condominiums. Jay currently works full-time as a content creator and author, and part-time as a behavioral health pharmacist. Jay lives in Cleveland, and in St. Petersburg, Florida, during the winter months. During his leisure time, you can find Jay exploring the latest arrivals at local libraries and bookstores. He also enjoys savoring a Cleveland Orchestra concert at Severance Hall, or immersing himself in new exhibits at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Jay, alongside his wife Joyce, enjoys attending weekly summer programs at Chautauqua Institution in southwestern New York state.
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.
Celeste Ng
Celeste Ng is the number one New York Times bestselling author of the novels Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere, and Our Missing Hearts. Ng is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and her work has been published in over thirty languages. To learn more about her, visit celesteng.com or follow her on Twitter (@pronounced_ing).
Melica Niccole
Melica Niccole is a native resident of Columbus, Ohio where she is an mother, author, poet, and Vocational Rehabilitation Counselor. Growing up on the Southeast Side of Columbus, she attended schools such as: Livingston Elementary, Barrett Middle, and Briggs High Schools. She also lived in New Jersey for approximately five years, where she co-founded an annual Children’s Book Festival in Camden, New Jersey, collected over 250 children’s books for book drives, collected book bags for a New York elementary school, and participated in local events.
She developed a fondness of writing and creating things at an early age. Writing was a creative expressive technique that she used to talk about various subject matters, such as relationships, domestic violence, friendships, and more. These subjects were mainly expressed in the form poetry.
After graduating from college, Melica sought to be a published author. Although she did not become a published author right after her undergraduate work at Otterbein University, the drive and determination within her stayed the same. She has performed in front of audiences at The National Black Book Festival, Inspired Word NYC, The Ohio State University, Newark Public Library (New Jersey), Laughin & Loungin, Writing Wrongs Poetry open mic events, and other places around the country. Her hard work finally paid off in August of 2010 when she released her first book titled, Dead Wrong. She has written 22 books/Kindle Vellas with 2 Children’s Books in development.
Melica has a Master’s Degree in Science Administration with a concentration in Health Services and a certificate in Human Resources from Central Michigan University. Her Bachelor’s of Arts Degree is in Health Promotion and Fitness from Otterbein University. In 2012, she was deemed the first alumni to receive the Author of the Month distinction at Otterbein. She was then awarded the Diversity (2018) and Leadership and Citizenship Awards (2019) from Otterbein as well, due to her work with planning and creating programming and collecting literacy items for disadvantaged populations. In 2022, Melica participated in Otterbein’s first African-American Read-In Program, which was an initiative developed by the National Council of Teachers of English. The initiative allows various schools and organizations to create similar programs based on their resources.
Melica loves living outside the box and creating new and exciting things. She believes that anything is possible with passion and determination. She has worked with individuals with Developmental Disabilities, Mental Health Diagnosis, At-risk youth, children, and various populations for about 15 years.