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
Kezia Sproat
Kezia Sproat, a native of Chillicothe, raised her family in Columbus, teaching English and Comparative Literature at Ohio State, where her 1975 dissertation on Shakespeare immediately won a national competition. A member of Women’s Poetry Workshop for 25 years, she co-founded the Community Film Association in 1978, and coordinated a “Festival of Dionysus” poetry competition in City Council Chambers at the 1987 Greater Columbus Arts Festival. Dr. Sproat was editor at OSU Center for Human Resource Research 1978-1985; writer/editor, Creative Services at Abbott Labs 1987-1990; and coordinator, SCOPS South Central Ohio Preservation Society, 1993-2013.
In 1987 Dr. Sproat began a serious study of nonviolence and founded Highbank Farm Peace Education Center in 1994. Her response to 9/11, “A Short Course in Nonviolence,” won recognition from Morehouse College and membership in the Board of Sponsors of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Chapel in Atlanta. A handbook, Beginning Nonviolence, appeared in 2013.
Tuwyn, her first book of poetry, was written during her Columbus years. In 1998 she restored her childhood home, where she lives in Chillicothe. A second poetry collection, Eh Tih Zwell, is set to release December 2019. Also in the pipeline are her collected essays, Sisterhood in Shakespeare.
Sherry Stanforth
Sherry Cook Stanforth, a native of Clermont County, Ohio, grew up in a circle of traditional Appalachian musicians who played dulcimers, guitars, fiddles, banjos and mandolins late into the night. Her singing, flute, tin whistle and harmonica styles were inspired by these old time jammers of her childhood. Over the years, she has performed regionally with Sunset Dawn and Tellico, a three-generation family band named for her father’s Tellico Plains Cherokee ancestry. “Of all the venues I play, the Fraley Festival of Traditional Music at Carter Caves, Kentucky, and my own back porch overlooking the Ohio River bring the most joy.”
As founder and director of Thomas More College’s Creative Writing Vision Program Sherry promotes regional authors, providing high-energy, interactive literary arts events for under-served populations in the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky community. She teaches fiction, poetry, environmental and ethnic literature, and folklore, and often collaborates with TMC students to provide school and public events that blend creative writing with music and the natural world. Currently, she serves as co-editor for Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the literary journal of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative, and as faculty adviser for Words, the campus literary magazine.
Drone String, her first full poetry collection, was nominated for a 2016 Pushcart Prize. Her other writing appears in various journals, anthologies, and NCTE books. She enjoys keeping bees, hiking mountains, and studying native plants. With her husband, David, she raises four children, two trusty hound dogs and a garden.
Dior J. Stephens
Dior J. Stephens is a proud Midwestern pisces poet. He is the author of the chapbooks SCREAMS & lavender, 001, and CANNON!, all with Ghost City Press. Dior holds an MFA in Creative Writing from California College of the Arts and is currently a doctoral candidate in the Philosophy program at the University of Cincinnati. CRUEL/CRUEL is his debut collection of poetry.
Alison Stine
ALISON STINE is the author of the novel Trashlands (MIRA / HarperCollins), which The LA Times called a “ballad to love in a time of darkness,” longlisted for the 2022 Reading the West Book Award, a current finalist for the Ohioana Book Award and currently longlisted for the 2022 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.…
Read MoreALISON STINE is the author of the novel Trashlands (MIRA / HarperCollins), which The LA Times called a “ballad to love in a time of darkness,” longlisted for the 2022 Reading the West Book Award, a current finalist for the Ohioana Book Award and currently longlisted for the 2022 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Her first novel Road Out of Winter won the 2021 Philip K. Dick Award.
She is also the author of three poetry collections published on university presses and a novella. Her next novel Dust will be published by Wednesday Books (Macmillan) in fall 2023.
Recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Ohio Arts Council grant, a Sustainable Arts grant, and a reporting grant from National Geographic, she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a Ruth Lilly Fellow from the Poetry Foundation, and received the Studs Terkel Award for Media and Journalism.
Partially deaf, she is the Staff Culture Writer at Salon, and has also reported for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, 100 Days in Appalachia, and more. After living in rural Ohio for many years, where she was raised and where her son was born, she now lives in Colorado with her family. Check out her website: https://www.alisonstine.com/
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.
Ann Townsend
Ann Townsend is the author of Dime Store Erotics (Silverfish Review Press, 1998) and The Coronary Garden (Sarabande Books, 2005). She is an editor, with David Baker, of a collection of essays, Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry (Graywolf Press, 2007), and is currently at work on a collection of essays on poetry, translation, and the natural world. Her poetry and essays have appeared in such magazines as Poetry, Paris Review, The Nation, Kenyon Review, and many others. The recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council, she has also received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Bernheim Arboretum, and the Lannan Foundation. She is the cofounder of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. In 2016 she, along with cofounders Cate Marvin and Erin Belieu, accepted the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, given in recognition of their work for the larger literary community. A professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, Ann Townsend hybridizes modern daylilies at Bittersweet Farm.
Tara Tyler
Tara Tyler has had a hand in everything from waitressing to rocket engineering. After moving all over the US, she now writes and teaches math in Ohio with her husband and one boy left in the nest. She has two novel series, Pop Travel (sci-fi detective thrillers) and Beast World (fantasy adventures), plus her UnPrincess novella series where the damsels save themselves. She’s a commended blogger, contributed to several anthologies, and to fit all these projects in, she economizes her time, aka the Lazy Housewife—someday she might write a book on that… Make every day an adventure!
Sara Moore Wagner
Sara Moore Wagner is the winner of the 2021 Cider Press Review Editors’ Prize for her manuscript Swan Wife (expected late summer 2022). She the author of the poetry manuscript Hillbilly Madonna (2020 Driftwood Press Manuscript prize winner), a 2021 National Poetry Series Finalist, and the recipient of a 2019 Sustainable Arts Foundation award. Her poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies including Sixth Finch, Waxwing, Nimrod, Beloit Poetry Journal, and The Cincinnati Review, among others. She lives in West Chester Ohio with her husband Jon, and children Cohen, Daisy, and Vivienne. Learn more at: https://www.saramoorewagner.com/
Laura Grace Weldon
Laura Grace Weldon served as Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year and is the author of four books, most recently the Halcyon Poetry Prize winner, Portals. Her poetry and creative nonfiction appear in Diode, Verse Daily, Cultural Weekly, and others. She works as a book editor, teaches writing workshops, and maxes out her library card each week.