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.
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John Scalzi
John Scalzi has written nearly all of his science fiction from a home office in Bradford, Ohio, where he can look out the window and see Amish buggies clopping by. His first published novel, 2005’s “Old Man’s War,” was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novel and helped him win the John W. Campbell/Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Scalzi would go on to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2013 for his New York Times bestselling novel Redshirts. His most recent novel, The Kaiju Preservation Society, is a 2023 Alex Award recipient and currently optioned for television. Scalzi also writes for the Emmy Award-winning television series Love Death + Robots, where Ohio features prominently in his episode “When the Yogurt Took Over.” In 2016, Scalzi’s work earned him the Governor’s Award for Arts in Ohio. https://whatever.scalzi.com/
Randall L. Schieber
Randall Lee Schieber is a photographer based in Columbus, Ohio. He specializes in editorial, architectural, location, and travel photography and has published six books and numerous calendars. His work has appeared in a variety of local and national publications.
Brandy Schillace
I grew up in an underground house, next to a graveyard, in abandoned coal lands… with a pet raccoon. Oddly, this tends not to surprise people as much as I think it will. My rural community skirted the poverty line, a place of failed industry and orange rivers, poor health, and poorer access to healthcare. As a result, I spent my childhood reading a lot about disease and going to a lot of funerals. I ended up with a Ph.D. and a career in science history, which is probably a likely thing to happen when you spend your early years in a cemetery.
I’ve worked in an English Department, a History Department, and for a Medical Anthropology journal. I spent five years as a research associate in a medical museum among amputation saws, surgery kits, and smallpox vaccines—and now, in addition to being an author, I’m Editor-in-Chief for BMJ’s Medical Humanities Journal. I tend to fall outside the borders and binaries on every side.
I always liked the line by Walt Whitman: I contain multitudes. Each of us are completely unique sets of data and DNA, blood and bones, bits and pieces of ancient stardust (and some microplastics). We don’t just have fingerprints. We are fingerprints — completely unique phenomenon in the universe, never before and never to be again. I am a truck, a train, a bulldog in a wind-tunnel; I’m also autistic. I live in the middle spaces where the contradictions are, containing bits of astral matter, aspects of both genders and possibly some dragons and vampires. I do history the way most people climb mountains–I get my hands dirty–I end up in catacombs, archives, basements. As you can imagine, this sort of thing doesn’t fit in a box very well. Then again, life is more interesting at the intersections.
***Addendum on that pet raccoon… She eventually figured out how to open the fridge. It was a whole thing.
Check out her website: https://brandyschillace.com/
J.H. Schiller
J. H. Schiller writes speculative fiction with a flair for the weird and a healthy dose of the absurd. She earned a graduate degree in international affairs and worked for the federal government in Washington, DC. She has since escaped to Ohio, where she is the founder and President of Dublin Creative Writers, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that provides education and community for authors in Ohio and beyond. Her short fiction has been featured in several anthologies and digital publications. The first two volumes in her Comedy of Horrors series, The Witch of Tophet County and Playing with Fire, are available now from Podium Publishing. She is a member of the SFWA.
Eugene Schmiel
Eugene D. Schmiel is a retired U.S. Department of State Foreign Service officer. He was an assistant professor of history at St. Francis University (PA) and has taught at Marymount, Shenandoah, and Penn State universities. He holds the Ph.D. degree from The Ohio State University and coauthored, with his wife Kathryn, a book on life in the Foreign Service.
Read MoreEugene D. Schmiel is a retired U.S. Department of State Foreign Service officer. He was an assistant professor of history at St. Francis University (PA) and has taught at Marymount, Shenandoah, and Penn State universities. He holds the Ph.D. degree from The Ohio State University and coauthored, with his wife Kathryn, a book on life in the Foreign Service.
Ken Schneck
Ken Schneck is an author, professor, radio host, and rabble rouser. His travelogue, “Seriously, What Am I Doing Here?: The Adventures of a Wondering and Wandering Gay Jew” was published in 2017, “LGBTQ Cleveland” was released in 2018, and “LGBTQ Columbus” hits the shelves in June of 2019. He is a frequent contributor to The Huffington Post, Cleveland Magazine and FreshWater Cleveland, and currently serves as the Editor for Prizm Magazine, Ohio’s only LGBTQ publication. For 10 years, he was the producer/host of “This Show is So Gay,” the award-winning, long-running radio show/podcast. In his spare time, he is a Professor of Education at Baldwin Wallace University.
Russell Schneider
Russell Schneider is an award-winning sportswriter who wrote for The Cleveland Plain Dealer until his retirement in 1993. He was elected to the Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame and has been nominated for election to the Baseball Writers Wing of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
Amy Schneider
Amy Schneider is an American software engineer and recent Jeopardy! champion. Following an impressive forty-game winning streak, she became the most successful woman ever to compete on Jeopardy!. She is second all-time in the show’s history, trailing only Ken Jennings. Amy is also the first openly transgender contestant to qualify for the Tournament of Champions. She has been covered in People, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, USA TODAY, and more, and she has appeared on Good Morning America.
Jennifer Schomburg Kanke
Jennifer Schomburg Kanke, after spending most of her life in Ohio, now lives in Florida. Her work has recently appeared in New Ohio Review, Pleiades, Massachusetts Review, and Shenandoah. She is the winner of a Sheila-Na-Gig Editor’s Choice Award for Fiction. Her zine about her experiences undergoing chemotherapy for ovarian cancer, Fine, Considering, is available from Rinky Dink Press (2019). Her full-length poetry collection, The Swellest Wife Anyone Ever Had, about Appalachian Ohio, is available now from Kelsay Books. She can be found on YouTube hosting the Meter Cute Interviews podcast focusing on interviews with contemporary writers on Meter&Mayhem.
E.F Schraeder
Author of As Fast as She Can (Sirens Call Publications, 2022) and Liar: Memoir of a Haunting (Omnium Gatherum, 2021), which was an Imadjinn Award finalist (2022), E.F. Schraeder is also the author of a story collection and two poetry chapbooks. Recent work has appeared in Lost Contact, Moonflowers & Nightshade, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, and other journals and anthologies. Schraeder’s nonfiction has appeared in Vastarien: A Literary Journal; Radical Teacher; the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom blog, and elsewhere. Awarded first place in Crystal Lake Publishing’s 2021 Poetry Contest, E.F. Schraeder’s work also placed as a semi-finalist in Headmistress Press’ Charlotte Mew Contest (2019). An Active Member in the Horror Writers Association, E. F. Schraeder believes in ghosts, magic, and dogs. Learn more at: https://efschraeder.com/