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
Julie L. Moore
Julie L. Moore is the author of Particular Scandals, which appears in The Poiema Poetry series by Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf & Stock Publishers. Her other books include Slipping Out of Bloom and Election Day. A Best of the Net and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Moore has won the Editor’s Choice Award from Writecorner Press, the Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize from Ruminate, and the Rosine Offen Memorial Award from the Free Lunch Arts Alliance. She’s also been a finalist in many competitions sponsored by acclaimed journals like Dogwood, River Styx, Many Mountains Moving, and Nimrod International Journal. Her poetry has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, The Missouri Review Online, Nimrod International Journal, Poetry Daily, The Southern Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Verse Daily.
Chiquita Mullins Lee
Chiquita Mullins Lee is an Arts Learning coordinator for the Ohio Arts Council (OAC) where she coordinates the Arts Partnership and Big Yellow School Bus grant programs and Ohio’s Poetry Out Loud National Recitation Contest. Formerly of Atlanta, she has over twenty years of experience in broadcast production and programming and worked as a public television producer/director in Nashville, Tennessee.…
Read MoreChiquita Mullins Lee is an Arts Learning coordinator for the Ohio Arts Council (OAC) where she coordinates the Arts Partnership and Big Yellow School Bus grant programs and Ohio’s Poetry Out Loud National Recitation Contest. Formerly of Atlanta, she has over twenty years of experience in broadcast production and programming and worked as a public television producer/director in Nashville, Tennessee. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Vassar College, a Master of Arts degree from Ohio University, and a second master’s degree from The Ohio State University.
Chiquita has served as the chair and Midwest regional coordinator for the Arts Education Working Group, in association with the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, and has served on the Arts Education and partnership review panels for the National Endowment for the Arts. As a teaching artist for OAC’s Artist-in-Residence program, she engaged students throughout Ohio in creative writing activities. She won individual artist/excellence awards in fiction and playwriting from the Greater Columbus Arts Council (GCAC) and in fiction and nonfiction from OAC. She was writer-in-residence at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts and at the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences in Rabun Gap, Georgia. Her nonfiction, fiction, and poetry have appeared in national literary journals and her work is featured on the PBS American Portrait project, For My People: The Re-Mix. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is featured on the Long Street Cultural Wall in Columbus, Ohio. She hosted the Emmy award-winning program, Traditions – Ohio Heritage Fellows produced by Think-TV in Dayton. She writes and performs with Columbus-based Wild Women Writing, and recently performed in the plays, Twelve Hours and The Shakespeare Club by Dave Carley, and Lost Lake by David Auburn. She portrayed Venus in William Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and appeared in PAST PRODUCTIONS’ presentation of Sisters by Marsha Jackson.
Chiquita co-wrote 12, a three-woman show about girls on the threshold of womanhood, and Myrlie, Coretta and Betty: the Mothers of the Civil Rights Movement, in which she plays Coretta Scott King. Chiquita’s critically acclaimed play, Pierce to the Soul, premiered at CATCO, toured central Ohio with A Portable Theatre Company, and was featured in the 2019 History in ACTion Playwright’s Festival, which also presented her monologue, Ms. Morrison Speaks to Pilate from Song of Solomon. A member of New Covenant Believers Church, Chiquita leads Word Warriors creative writing ministry. Her picture book, YOU GOTTA MEET MR. PIERCE, co-authored with Carmella Van Vleet and illustrated by Jennifer Mack-Watkins is published by Kokila Books, an imprint of Penguin/Random House.
Learn more at: https://www.chiquitamullinslee.com/
Patricia Colleen Murphy
Patricia Colleen Murphy founded Superstition Review at Arizona State University, where she teaches creative writing and magazine production. She won the 2019 Press 53 Award for Poetry with her collection Bully Love, published as a Tom Lombardo Poetry Selection. Her collection Hemming Flames (Utah State University Press) won the 2016 May Swenson Poetry Award, judged by Stephen Dunn, and the 2017 Milt Kessler Poetry Award. A chapter from her memoir-in-progress was published as a chapbook by New Orleans Review. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona.
Theofania Music
Theofania Music is a classically trained lifetime pianist and composer since the age of four. As a lifelong writer and photographer, her photography and vulnerable poetry have only privately accompanied her compositions until now!
Theofania’s lifetime of manuscripts, prints, and compositions thus far, made for an idea of this compilation of poetry and photography.…
Read MoreTheofania Music is a classically trained lifetime pianist and composer since the age of four. As a lifelong writer and photographer, her photography and vulnerable poetry have only privately accompanied her compositions until now!
Theofania’s lifetime of manuscripts, prints, and compositions thus far, made for an idea of this compilation of poetry and photography. She encompasses a commitment to tell the story through light and sound, and to awaken and evoke feelings and thoughts to the listener and reader.
Theofania Music’s life’s work is transforming light and sound with a hope to connect humanity with nature. She has decades of experience creating a unique individual genre of “Raw-Piano”. Theofania Music has released five albums and three singles… all available on various musical platforms. Her single Perfect Geometry is reaching far beyond her expectations.
She is a gallery solo artist who brings a unique journey to the public, exhibiting her photography and music. A Vinyasa, Hatha, and Yin Yoga practitioner and instructor, Theofania believes that the journey of music, art, and literature runs through us all in mind, body, and soul. Theofania is currently recording new albums to be released while fine-tuning her composed classical full-length musical Symphony. Her composing continues, and her writings continue as a life’s-long novel is in the works.
Feel free to connect to Theofania Music at http://www.theofaniamusic.com @theofaniamusic on social media platforms.
“As long as I am able, I wish to share with all of humanity, the beauty in everything which I can hear and see.” – Theofania Music
“Everything is Connected” – Theofania Music
ENDURE MY COMPANY by THEOFANIA MUSIC
The complete first edition of poetry and photography from piano composer Theofania Music.
Have you ever desired to know what a composer thinks of at the time in which they compose a piece of music? Have you wondered what a music’s journey would be like from the moment a composer hears or sees a melody to when you hear the music? This is a glimpse into a composer’s life using poetry and photography.
Theofania Music walks alongside the reader… sharing emotional moments and imaginative awareness through each turned page. These poetic works evoke feelings of love and life, of beauty and sadness, of isolation and romance, of equations and time, of awakening and humanity, and so many more issues and passions.
The reader is able to walk with the composer through nature, allowing an incredible experience of poetical ideas and elusive thoughts, from constructing images through words and sound. At the same time, Theofania Music shows the reader to see the music of the prose as she weaves reflection and light in the form of photography.
A true journey of light and sound is experienced as composer Theofania Music opens a door to her world, hands you a cup of coffee or tea, and shares playful, philosophical ideas, extraordinary photography, and seriously vulnerable and intellectual poetry.
Deni Naffziger
Deni Naffziger is the author of Desire to Stay, poems (Stockport Flats Press, 2014), Strange Bodies, poems (Shadelandhouse Modern Press, 2023), and she co-authored Revenants: A Story of Many Lives, which was commissioned by the Houston-Hardin school district and supported with an Ohio Arts Council special projects grant. She edited Riverwind literary magazine, a national publication out of Hocking College, from 1986 – 2003. Naffziger, a Fulbright Scholar, is a retired professor (Hocking College, Ohio University). She currently serves as poet-in-residence at the Passion Works Collaborative Arts Studio in Athens, Ohio.
Marilyn Nelson
Marilyn Nelson is the author of many award-winning books, including Carver: A Life in Poems, which was a National Book Award finalist, a Newbery Honor Book, and a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and received the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award and the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award. She is also the author of A Wreath for Emmett Till, which garnered the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, a Coretta Scott King Honor, a Printz Honor, and a Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award Honor. She lives in Connecticut. https://marilyn-nelson.com/
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/
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.
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.
Sarah Rose Nordgren
Sarah Rose Nordgren is a poet, teacher, and multiform text artist. Her two books of poetry are Best Bones (2014), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and Darwin’s Mother, which is recently released from University of Pittsburgh Press (November 2017).
Her poems and essays appear widely in periodicals such as Agni, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review Online, Copper Nickel, and American Poetry Review, and she creates video and performance text art in collaboration with Kathleen Kelley under the name Smart Snow.
Among her awards are two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, and fellowships and scholarships from the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Conferences, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts.
Originally from North Carolina, Nordgren earned her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MFA in poetry from University of North Carolina Greensboro. She’s currently at the University of Cincinnati where she is a doctoral candidate in poetry with a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Nordgren serves as an Associate Editor at 32 Poems.