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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Megan Hart
Megan Hart writes books. Some of them use bad words, but most of the other words are okay. Some of them hit bestseller lists and win awards and some don’t, but that’s the way it goes. She can’t live without music, the internet, or the ocean, but she and soda have achieved an amicable uncoupling. She loathes the feeling of corduroy or velvet, and modern art leaves her cold. She writes a little bit of everything from horror to romance, though she’s best known for writing steamy fiction that sometimes makes you cry. Find out more about her at meganhart.com, or if you really want to get crazy, follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/megan_hart and Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/readinbed.
David Hassler
David Hassler, MFA directs the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. In 2009, he cofounded Traveling Stanzas, a community arts project which creates illustrations in response to poems generated from community workshops in schools, healthcare facilities, libraries, senior centers, and veterans’ organizations. Hassler is the author or editor of ten books of poetry and nonfiction, including Dear Vaccine: Global Voices Speak to the Pandemic; Growing Season: The Life of a Migrant Community; and Speak a Powerful Magic: Ten Years of the Traveling Stanzas Poetry Project. His play, May 4th Voices: Kent State, 1970, based on the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project, was published by The Kent State University Press along with a Teacher’s Resource Book and was produced in 2020 as a national radio play by the WKSU NPR station. Hassler’s awards include Ohio Poet of the Year, the Ohioana Book Award, and the Carter G. Woodson Honor Book Award. His TEDx talk, “The Conversation of Poetry,” conveys the power of poetry to strengthen communities. In addition to his creative writing publications, he has co-authored articles on poetry, technology, and healing in the Journal of Palliative Medicine, the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, and the Online Journal of Issues in Nursing.
Anastasia Hastings
Anastasia Hastings is from Brecksville, Ohio. Her newest release is book #2 of the Dear Miss Hermione historical mystery series, Of Hoaxes and Homicide. Publishers Weekly called the book “captivating” and gave it a starred review. The first book of the series, Of Manners and Murder” has been praised by The Wall Street Journal as evoking “…the shocking revelations of Wilkie Collins, the social acuity of Janes Austen and the comic melodrama of Oscar Wilde.” Learn more at: https://www.mystery-book-series.com/.
Julie Hatcher
Julie Hatcher is an award-winning and bestselling author of mystery and romantic suspense. She has published more than fifty novels under multiple pen names since her debut in 2013. Writing as Julie Anne Lindsey, Hatcher has earned many accolades for her work, including the 2020 National Readers’ Choice Award for Romance Adventure and the 2019 Daphne du Maurier Award for Mystery/Suspense, among others. When she’s not creating new worlds or fostering the epic love of fictional characters, Julie can be found in Kent, Ohio, enjoying her blessed Midwestern life—and probably plotting murder with her shamelessly enabling friends. Today she hopes to make someone smile. But one day she plans to change the world.
Sharon Hatfield
About Sharon Hatfield
Sharon Hatfield grew up loving Nancy Drew mysteries and listening to her grandmother read Grimm’s Fairy Tales aloud. Years later, she’s still interested in mysteries of various kinds, which has influenced her choice of nonfiction book topics. Her newest book, Enchanted Ground: The Spirit Room of Jonathan Koons, was published by Ohio University Press in October 2018.
A native of Ewing, Virginia, she began writing poems and stories at an early age. After earning undergraduate degrees in English and biology at Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee, she became a newspaper reporter in Virginia. Sharon moved to Ohio in 1985 and later earned a master’s degree in journalism from Ohio University and an MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College in Maryland. She has worked as a reporter, editor, English professor and manuscript consultant.
Sharon has twice received an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, most recently in spring 2018 for her work on Enchanted Ground. Her previous book Never Seen the Moon: The Trials of Edith Maxwell won the Weatherford and Chaffin awards for nonfiction.
She has served as a panelist for the Kentucky Arts Council and on the faculty of the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop in Hindman, Kentucky, and the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival in Harrogate, Tennessee. In her adopted hometown of Athens, Ohio, she is a member of the Southeast Ohio History Center and is active in environmental work. She also volunteers as an adviser to the Jenco Fund of the Foundation for Appalachian Ohio, an endowment that supports visionary leadership in the region.
About the Book
Enchanted Ground addresses spiritualism as a 19th-century religious movement and explains the place of Jonathan Koons and his family within it. The movement began in western New York in 1848 and extended into the cities and rural communities of the Midwest. Curious visitors travelled from as far as New Orleans to Athens County, Ohio, to a remote country cabin whose marvels would rival any of P. T. Barnum’s attractions. People dressed in homespun crowded in with those in city attire to experience what spiritualist Jonathan Koons and his son Nahum would demonstrate in the pitch dark of the log cabin night after night.
Jonathan Koons was considered one of the most impressive physical mediums of the 1850s. His Athens County “spirit room,” built specifically for theatrical-style séances, was known for a musical “angel band” that allegedly played along as Jonathan fiddled. On some evenings the audience was also treated to the appearance of spectral hands that scribbled messages on sheets of paper. Today Koons is considered by historians of religion to be the innovator of the trumpet used for voice communication in séances. Replicas of his famed spirit room were built in Ohio, Indiana, Massachusetts and beyond. Hatfield’s Enchanted Ground is not only a portrait of a charismatic medium, but the story of a countercultural force that shook American religion in the 19th-century.
Kathryn Haueisen
Kathryn Haueisen loves to meet fascinating people and write articles and books about them. Sometimes she lets her imagination run wild and writes short stories about imaginary people, loosely based on people she’s met. She’s published seven books, both non-fiction and fiction. Her most recent books are historical novels about the famous Mayflower voyage, the 17th century issues in Europe that led to the voyage, and the first encounters between the New England settlers and the Indigenous peoples. She has published dozens of articles in assorted faith-based and consumer publications. Since retiring from active ministry as an ordained Protestant pastor she has been focusing on writing regular blogs and a monthly newsletter at http://www.howwisethen.com.
Sherri Hayes
Sherri spent most of her childhood detesting English class. It was one of her least favorite subjects because she never seemed to fit into the standard mold. She wasn’t good at spelling, or following grammar rules, and outlines made her head spin. For that reason, Sherri never imagined becoming an author. At the age of thirty, all of that changed. After getting frustrated with the direction a television show was taking two of its characters, Sherri decided to try her hand at writing an alternate ending, and give the characters their happily ever after. By the time the story finished, it was one of the top ten read stories on the site, and her readers were encouraging her to write more.
Writing has become a creative outlet that allows her to explore a wide range of emotions, while having fun taking her characters through all the twists and turns she can create.
Wil Haygood
Will Haygood is a former Boston Globe (where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist) and Washington Post reporter. Haygood has received writing fellowships from the Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Alicia Patterson Foundations. His biographies of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Sammy Davis Jr., Sugar Ray Robinson, and Thurgood Marshall have been widely acclaimed. Haygood also wrote the New York Times bestseller, The Butler: A Witness to History, which was adapted into an award-winning movie. Haygood is currently serving an appointment as Boadway Visiting Distinguished Scholar at his alma mater, Miami University, Ohio.
William Heath
William Heath was born in Youngstown, grew up in Poland, Ohio, with a BA from Hiram College and a Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University. He has taught American literature and creative writing at Kenyon, Transylvania, Vassar, the University of Seville, and Mt. St. Mary’s University, where the William Heath Award is given annually to the best student writer. He is the author of three novels: The Children Bob Moses Led (winner of the Hackney Literary Award), Blacksnake’s Path, and Devil Dancer, three poetry books: The Walking Man, Steel Valley Elegy, and Going Places, two chapbooks: Night Moves in Ohio and Leaving Seville, a work of history: William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest (winner of two Spur Awards), and a collection of interviews: Conversations with Robert Stone. He can be found online at http://www.williamheathbooks.com