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
Sarah M. Wells
Sarah M. Wells is the author of Pruning Burning Bushes, and a chapbook of poems, Acquiesce, winner of the 2008 Starting Gate Award. Poems by Wells have appeared or are forthcoming in Alimentum, Ascent, Christianity & Literature, JAMA, Literary Mama, Measure, New Ohio Review, Nimrod, Poetry East, Puerto del Sol, Rock & Sling, and elsewhere. Her essays have been published by Ascent and River Teeth. Sarah’s poetry has been honored with two Pushcart Prize nominations. Her essay, “Those Summers, These Days” was named a notable essay in the Best American Essays 2012. She has received scholarships to attend the Key West Literary Seminar and West Chester Poetry Conferences. Sarah serves as the Administrative Director for the low-residency MFA program at Ashland University and Managing Editor for the Ashland Poetry Press and River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. She resides in Ashland, Ohio with her husband, Brandon, and their three young children, Lydia, Elvis, and Henry. http://www.sarahmwells.com
Jessica Weyer-Bentley
Jessica Weyer Bentley is an author/poet. Her first collection of poetry, Crimson Sunshine, was published in May 2020 by AlyBlue Media. Her second collection, Down Below Where the Canary Sings, was published in May of 2023 by Sage Owl Publishing in Massachusetts. She has contributed work to several publications for the Award-Winning Book Series, Grief Diaries. Jessica’s work has been published in countless anthologies both in print and online. She is the Ohio Poetry Association Student Contest Chair. Jessica grew up in the hills of Eastern Kentucky and currently resides in Northwest Ohio with her husband, Larry, and her two children, Laura and Joseph.
Scott Woods
Scott Woods is a writer and event organizer in Columbus, Ohio. Woods is the author of Urban Contemporary History Month (2016), We Over Here Now (2013), Prince and Little Weird Black Boy Gods (2017), and Black Night is Falling (2024). He has been featured multiple times in national press, including appearances on National Public Radio. He is the founder of Streetlight Guild, a performing arts non-profit, a 2018 Columbus Foundation Spirit of Columbus Award recipient, as well as the Greater Columbus Arts Council winner of the 2017 Columbus Makes Art Excellence Award for his event series, “Holler: 31 Days of Columbus Black Art”. Woods was named the first-ever “Face of Columbus” by Columbus Alive. He is the 2022 winner of the Press Club of Cleveland’s Ohio Excellence in Journalism award for Best in Ohio Essay Writing, and was awarded “Best Columnist in Ohio” in 2023 by the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists. He is the co-founder of the Writers’ Block Poetry Night. In 2020 he won an Ohio Valley Regional Emmy Award for contributions to A House That Cannot Fail. In 2006 became the first poet to ever complete a 24-hour solo poetry reading; a feat he bested seven more times without repeating a single poem.
Felicia Zamora
Felicia Zamora is a poet, educator, and editor currently living in OH. She is the author of six books of poetry including: I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize released from the University of Iowa Press in April 2021, Quotient forthcoming from Tinderbox Editions in 2022, Body of Render, winner of the 2018 Benjamin Saltman Award from Red Hen Press (2020), Instrument of Gaps (Slope Editions, 2018), & in Open, Marvel (Parlor Press, 2018), and Of Form & Gather, winner of the 2016 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (University of Notre Dame Press). She’s received fellowships and residencies from CantoMundo, Ragdale Foundation, PLAYA, Moth Magazine, and Noepe Center at Martha’s Vineyard, authored two chapbooks, won the 2020 C.P. Cavafy Prize, the 2019 Wabash Prize for Poetry and the 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and was the 2017 Poet Laureate of Fort Collins, CO. Her poems and essays are found or forthcoming in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, American Poetry Review, Boston Review online, Georgia Review, Guernica, Literary Hub, Missouri Review Poem-of-the-Week, Orion, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Daily, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, The Nation, and others. She is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and is the associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review.
Visit her website at: https://www.feliciazamora.com/
D.E. Zuccone
Dominic Zuccone was born in Youngstown Ohio. Graduated Xavier University B.A. in Theology and Education. Graduated Vermont College of Fine Arts. He has worked in Alternative Education in Kentucky and Texas and been a private Educational Consultant for over twenty-five years. He has professionally presented on Visual Perception, Spectral Filters, Suggestopedia, Reading Disabilities, Affective Classroom Interventions and Dyslexia. D E Zuccone has published poetry in Borderlands, Water Stone, International Review of Poetry, Southern Indiana Review, Schuylkill Review, Hurricane Review, Big River, Apalachee Review, Deep Water Literary Review, South Florida Poetry Review, and Garden Box. My work has been in anthologies from Round Top, Taos Artists, Words& Art, Mutabulis Press, and Big Poetry Review. I curated the on-line poetry discussion Ex Libris and was on the Board of Directors for Houston’s “Public Poetry”. I have been a featured reader in Houston, Brooklyn, Taos, Los Angeles, and a frequent reader at Archway Gallery and Words & Art at Rice University and the Menil Museum.