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.
For more information about our collection and programming for authors, please click on the "Authors" main tab above.
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A.V. Smith
A.V. Smith is an athlete turned writer. With a passion for storytelling, he paints with words that captivate readers. Smith writes on an emotional level to empower readers to engage in deeper conversations about their past, their relationships, and their connection with the Universe.
With his first book, Madison: God’s Fingerprint 1.618, he won the 2019 Author Academy Award for Best Romance. Book two in the Madison series: Madison: In the Presence of God, reached #1 Best Seller, and the third installment, Madison: Vengeance Is Mine also achieved #1 Best Seller ranking. Book four, Madison: Upon This Rock is set to release January of 2025.
Smith took a break from romance and focused his literary talent on crime and social issues that divide our society with OHIO 10 and OHIO 10 II. Both books garnered #1 Best Seller upon release.
Normal Chaos: Ledoma (Book 1) is his first Fantasy Fiction book. He strives to push the boundaries of creativity, realizing there is no box in writing fiction or our shared journey.
Through life and love, he has learned our steps are temporary, yet the journey intensely meaningful. This understanding led him to donate a kidney to his younger brother. As the father of three children, his desire is to see his children overcome the fear of success by being the best version of themselves. He strives to lead by example, at times falling short, but understanding human beings are still a work in progress. When he is not engaged in his passion, you can find him with a fishing pole in his hand, attending a local artist event or somewhere deep in the woods hiking and enjoying the gift of nature. Learn more about A.V. Smith and his work at avsmithbooks.com
Lucy A. Snyder
Lucy A. Snyder is the author of 15 books and over 100 published short stories. Her most recent titles are the apocalyptic horror novel Sister, Maiden, Monster and the collection Halloween Season. She lives near Columbus, Ohio with a jungle of houseplants, a clowder of cats, and an insomnia of housemates. You can learn more about her at http://www.lucysnyder.com and you can follow her on Twitter at @LucyASnyder.
Jennifer Sommer
As a children’s librarian for twenty years, Jennifer Sommer’s annual Halloween Mad Scientist’s Lab was always her favorite program for the ghouls and gals. Jennifer’s culinary witch skills improved each year as new, scary, and surprisingly tasty additions were added to her Witchy Kitchen Cookbook. Every Creature Eats includes just a few of the creepy edible treats. Learn more at: https://jennifersommer.weebly.com/
Tricia Springstubb
Tricia Springstubb is the award-winning author of fiction for readers of all ages- picture books, chapter books, middle grade and early young adult novels. Her newest book, How To Tell A True Story, is a suspenseful story about the slippery nature of truth, especially in the light of social media. She lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and is a frequent speaker at schools, libraries and conferences. Visit her online at triciaspringstubb.com
Jyotsna Sreenivasan
Jyotsna Sreenivasan is the author of the short story collection These Americans and the novel And Laughter Fell From the Sky. Both are about Indian Americans. She was selected as a Fiction Fellow for the 2021 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her short stories have been published in literary magazines and anthologies. She received an Artist Fellowship Grant from the Washington, DC Commission on the Arts. She was born and raised in Ohio. Her parents are immigrants from India. For information about Jyotsna as well as other writers who are children of immigrants, please see http://www.SecondGenStories.com.
Dorri Steinhoff
Dorri Steinhoff grew up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago where she developed a love of nature, art and architecture. She met Joe Kuspan while in graduate school in Cincinnati. Their common interest in art and architecture led to numerous design and renovation projects including two boutique shops in the Short North Art District of Columbus, Ohio and five central Ohio homes. They are currently enjoying watching the seasons change at Glenbrow with their two daughters, Maren and Sofia, while continuing to restore the 1964 Glenbrow tower.
Aileen Stewart
Aileen Stewart is the award winning author of the Fern Valley Series which includes Fern Valley, Return to Fern Valley, and Cooking in Fern Valley, as well as the new Quack and Daisy Picture Book Series, a public speaker, amateur photographer, a blogger, and SCBWI member. In addition, she hosts writing workshops for children in first to sixth grade, offers library and school visits, and speaks at events. She resides in lovely Shelby, Ohio with her beautiful daughter, wonderful husband, and their crazy cats Max, Daisy, and Fluffy. Her motto is “Kids Who Read Can Do Anything!”
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
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 six full-length books of poetry: The Resurrectionist’s Diary; Luz Bones; In the Present Tense: Portraits of My Father; The Casanova Chronicles; How Else to Love the World; and The Art of Loss, for which she received the 2001 Ohio Poet of the Year Award. She is a two-time Finalist for the Ohioana Book Award, and the recipient of three Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards in Poetry, a Full Fellowship to Vermont Studio Center, the 2017 New Letters Poetry Prize, and the 2002 Poetry Award from Weber–The Contemporary West. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, among others, and have appeared in such journals as Poetry, Ploughshares, Boston Review, TriQuarterly, The Massachusetts Review, Boulevard, Nimrod, and River Styx. Her work has also appeared in nine anthologies, including Flora Poetica: The Chatto Book of Botanical Verse; I Have My Own Song For It: Modern Poems of Ohio; and Beloved on the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude. Stone is a founding member of The Greenville Poets, based in Greenville, Ohio, where she lives with her husband in an 18th century Rhode Island farmhouse.