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.
- You are searching within category(ies): Poetry
Steve Abbott
A product of parochial schools and the social & political upheavals of mid-20th century America, Columbus native Steve Abbott has been a community activist, alternative newspaper writer and editor, criminal defendant, delivery truck driver, courtroom bailiff, private investigator, unemployed stepfather, social-service PR director, and college professor. He was a founding member in 1984 of The Poetry Forum—now the Midwest’s longest-running poetry series—and continues to co-host the weekly event at Bossy Grrls Pin-Up Joint in Columbus. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in English of Columbus State Community College. His poems have appeared in dozens of literary journals as well as in several anthologies. He received an Ohio Arts Council Excellence Award in Poetry in 1993 and the following year was the first writer to be awarded an OAC residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. He has presented readings throughout the eastern United States.
He has two full-length poetry collections. A Green Line Between Green Fields (Kattywompus Press) was published in 2018, and A Language the Image Speaks, a collection of ekphrastic poems (responses to visual art), was released by 11thour Press in September 2019. He also has five chapbooks: A Short History of the Word (1996) and Greatest Hits (2004), both from Pudding House; The Incoherent Pull of Want (NightBallet Press) and Why Not Be Here Now? (11thour Press) in 2016; and Kicking Mileposts in the Video Age (Moria Poetry, 2017). He has also recorded a live reading on CD titled Stardust in Franklin Park. He edited the anthologies Cap City Poets (Pudding House, 2008), a collection of 74 central Ohio poets, and Everything Stops and Listens (OPA Press, 2013), containing work by members of Ohio Poetry Association. He also edits Ohio Poetry Association’s annual journal Common Threads, and in 2015 he represented the OPA on the Ohio Arts Council panel selecting Ohio’s first Poet Laureate.
Hanif Abdurraqib
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2021, he released the book A Little Devil In America with Random House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. The book won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Gordon Burn Prize. Hanif is a graduate of Beechcroft High School. Check out his website: http://www.abdurraqib.com/
Pamela R. Anderson
Pamela R. Anderson is a traveler, blues music lover, yoga practitioner, and former public radio fundraiser who grew up in Ohio’s Steel Valley. Her chapbook Just the Girls: A Kaleidoscope of Butterflies; A Drift of Honeybees was published by The Poetry Box in 2020; Finishing Line Press published her chapbook Widow Maker in 2021, and Kelsay Books/Daffydown Dilly Press published her book of poems for children: The Galloping Garbage Truck. Much of her writing focuses on the Holocaust and her father’s WWII service in the 82nd Airborne; her Holocaust poem “My Brother’s Coat” won an AWP Intro Journals Project award. Anderson’s poetry has appeared in JennyMag.org, Atticus Review, Volney Road Review, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the NEOMFA Program.
Nin Andrews
Nin Andrews’s poems and stories have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies including Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2003, 2013), The Best American Erotic Poems from 1800, The Best American Prose Poems, No Boundaries, Sudden Stories: A Mammoth Anthology of Miniscule Fiction, The House of Your Dreams: An International Collection of Prose Poems, Seriously Funny, and Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence. The recipient of an individual artist grant from the Ohio Arts Council in 1997 and again in 2003, she is the author of six chapbooks and six full-length poetry collections. Her book, Why God Is a Woman, won the 2016 Ohioana award in poetry. Her next book, Miss August, will be published in the spring of 2017. The mother of two grown children, she lives in Poland, Ohio, with her husband, a physics professor and bass player, and their Boston terrier, Froda.
Fred Andrle
Fred Andrle is a poet and playwright. He is the author of the poetry collections: What Counts and Love Life. His poetry was featured in the anthology Prayers to Protest: Poems that Center and Bless Us, and his poem “The Book,” was read by Garrison Keillor on “The Writer’s Almanac.” Fred has received playwriting and poetry fellowships from the Greater Columbus Arts Council.…
Read MoreFred Andrle is a poet and playwright. He is the author of the poetry collections: What Counts and Love Life. His poetry was featured in the anthology Prayers to Protest: Poems that Center and Bless Us, and his poem “The Book,” was read by Garrison Keillor on “The Writer’s Almanac.” Fred has received playwriting and poetry fellowships from the Greater Columbus Arts Council. Fred is an Associate at the Ohio State University Humanities Institute. Before his retirement in 2009, Fred spent twenty years at WOSU, the NPR affiliate in Columbus, as Executive Producer and Host of “Open Line,” a daily public affairs talk show. Prior to that, he was Executive Producer for WOSU-TV. He has received Ohio Public Broadcasting and Regional Emmy awards for his radio and television programs. The Ohio Humanities Council gave Fred their 2010 Bjornson Award for Distinguished Service in the Humanities. Fred taught courses in mass media at Ohio Wesleyan University, Ohio Dominican University, and Northern Arizona University. He holds a Master’s Degree in Communication from Stanford.
Patricia Averbach
Patricia Averbach, a Cleveland native, is the former director of the Chautauqua Writers’ Center in Chautauqua, New York. Her first novel, Painting Bridges dealt with historic issues in deaf education. It was described by Michelle Ross, critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, as “an intelligent, introspective and moving novel.” Averbach was the 2013 winner of the London based Lumen/Camden Prize for Poetry. Her poetry chapbook, Missing Persons, was featured in the Times of London Literary Supplement as one of the top poetry pamphlets of the year. For more on Averbach go to her website at patriciaaverbach.com.
Ruth Awad
Ruth Awad is a Lebanese-American poet whose debut poetry collection Set to Music a Wildfire (Southern Indiana Review Press 2017) won the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry and the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of a 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and she won the 2012 and 2013 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and the 2011 Copper Nickel Poetry Contest. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, The Rumpus, The Missouri Review, Sixth Finch, Crab Orchard Review, The Adroit Journal, BOAAT Journal, and elsewhere. Her work also appears in several anthologies, including Bettering American Poetry Vol. 2.
David Baker
David Baker is author of thirteen books of poetry, recently Whale Fall, published in July 2022 by W. W. Norton, and Swift: New and Selected Poems, as well as six books of prose about poetry. Among his awards are prizes and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, NEA, Mellon Foundation, and Poetry Society of America. Baker’s poetry and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, and others. He served for many years as Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review, where he continues to curate the annual eco-poetry issue, “Nature’s Nature.” Baker lives in Granville, Ohio.