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): Nonfiction
James Renner
James Renner is the author of several true crime books, as well as the novels The Man from Primrose Lane and The Great Forgetting. His latest work is the nonfiction thriller, True Crime Addict. He sometimes teaches Composition and Fiction Appreciation at Kent State University and the University of Akron.
James Reston
James Reston, Jr. was an assistant to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall before serving in the US Army from 1965 to 1968. He is the bestselling author of seventeen books–including The Conviction of Richard Nixon: The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon Interviews, which helped inspire the film Frost/Nixon (2008)–three plays, and numerous articles in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times Magazine. He won the Prix Italia and Dupont-Columbus Award for his NPR radio documentary, Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown. He lives with his wife in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
Jim Reuther
Jim Reuther received a bachelor’s in chemistry in 1973, a master’s in chemistry in 1976 and a doctorate in fuel science in 1979. In 1984, he retired as associate professor of fuel science after advising the scholarly research of five doctoral and seven master of science graduates. In 2015, he retired from a global nonprofit as a research leader in chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive weapons of mass destruction defense. He has traveled from Alaska to Afghanistan as a subject matter expert investigating fires and explosions, defeating improvised explosive devices (IEDs), reducing IED fireball skin burns, collecting forensic intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, and demilitarizing chemical weapons. He has won eight patents and an R&D100 Award for a top invention in the World in 1996. He is a 2011 Ohio Soccer Hall of Fame referee inductee. Reuther’s retirement plans include volunteering and more writing, including tales on light whispering and flame wizardry. He is Theresa Reuther’s widower; they were married for 36 years. He has two adult children.
Brad Ricca
Brad Ricca is the Edgar-nominated author of six books, including the new graphic novel (with artist Courtney Sieh) Ten Days in a Mad-house and the Ohioana Award winning Super Boys. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio. Learn more at: https://www.trueraiders.com/
Daniel L. Rice
Daniel L. Rice was the Chief Zoologist for the Division of Natural Areas and Preserves within the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. He spent 25 years with the Division documenting populations of Ohio’s rare and endangered species and retired in 2002.
Marci Rich
Marci Rich has published poetry, essays, and journalism, and earned honors from organizations and publications as varied as the Academy of American Poets, the Abiko Quarterly for James Joyce Studies (Japan), BlogHer, Huffington Post, and the Press Club of
Cleveland, from which she has twice won Best Freelance Writer in Ohio awards in its All Ohio Excellence in Journalism competitions in 2018 and 2019. The latter awards recognize her local history feature series, “Look
Back, Elyria,” which she writes for the Chronicle-Telegram and which forms the basis of Looking Back at Elyria: A Midwest City at Midcentury, her first nonfiction book. A graduate of Oberlin College, where she earned a bachelor of arts degree in English with a creative writing specialization, Marci has also studied memoir writing at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown,
Massachusetts. She also earned an associate of arts degree from Lorain County Community College. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Theta Kappa, the Authors Guild, the National Society of Newspaper
Columnists, the Press Club of Cleveland, Literary Cleveland, James River Writers, and the Lorain County Historical Society. A chapbook of her poems, Lights and Shadows, was published by Bottom Dog Press in
1985 under her former name, Marci Janas.
David Rickert
David Rickert grew up in Columbus, Ohio surrounded by stacks of MAD Magazines, Calvin and Hobbes collections, and Walt Disney comics. He spent most of his free time learning about sable hair brushes, non-repro blue pencils, and Bristol boards so he could pursue a career drawing a comic strip. He went to Ohio State University instead to pursue a degree in education, but never gave up on the dream! He drew a daily strip in The Lantern (OSU’s school newspaper) for most of his college years. After earning a teaching degree and working a few years in the classroom, the itch to create comics resurfaced. He headed back to the drawing board (literally) to create educational comics, selling them on the Teachers Pay Teachers marketplace. Educators from around the world have enthusiastically embraced his comics as an effective way to teach difficult language arts concepts, especially with reluctant readers and English language learners. When he’s not drawing comics, David likes to do yoga, play guitar, and read.
Conlee Ricketts
Conlee Ricketts has been an educator for over 30 years with her BSEd in Secondary Mathematics Education from The Ohio State University, and her MEd in Administration/Teacher Leader from Wright State University. Conlee’s honesty and humor helps you examine fears and vulnerabilities in a safe lighthearted way. Her life has been about surviving awkward social situations and problem solving. She is an expert at finding options, organizing a plan, and quieting over-active mind chatter long enough to calm the chaos of an incredibly human and messy life. She lives in Bexley, Ohio with her daughter, father, and a myriad of pets and their associated dirt.
Mark Rigney
Mark Rigney’s stage plays have been produced in twenty-three U.S. states (including off-Broadway) plus Australia, Austria, Canada, Hong Kong, Nepal, and New Zealand. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild and his published plays are available from Playscripts, Inc., Next Stage Press, Heartland, and multiple editions of Smith & Kraus’s The Best Ten-Minute Plays. His novel Vinyl Wonderland arrived from Castle Bridge in June 2024, and in non-fiction, he is the author of Deaf Side Story: Deaf Sharks, Hearing Jets and a Classic American Musical (Gallaudet). Nearly seventy of his short stories have found print, in venues ranging from literary (Witness, The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review) to fantasy and horror (Lightspeed, Cemetery Dance, Unlikely Story, Wyldblood, Black Static). When nobody’s looking, he adds to his collection of antique brewery items, gardens, and laments that his body won’t let him continue playing ultimate (Frisbee) tournaments. His website, which includes links to many of his (free!) online stories, is markrigney.net.
Edward J. Roach
Edward J. Roach is the site historian and resource manager at Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park in Ohio, where he manages the park’s library and museum collections and also assists partners in conserving and interpreting the artifacts and stories that they preserve. He has B.A. and M.A. degrees in history from Moravian College (Bethlehem, Pa.) and Indiana University of Pennsylvania (Indiana, Pa.), respectively, and taught English with the Peace Corps in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, before gaining employment with the National Park Service in 2001.…
Read MoreEdward J. Roach is the site historian and resource manager at Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park in Ohio, where he manages the park’s library and museum collections and also assists partners in conserving and interpreting the artifacts and stories that they preserve. He has B.A. and M.A. degrees in history from Moravian College (Bethlehem, Pa.) and Indiana University of Pennsylvania (Indiana, Pa.), respectively, and taught English with the Peace Corps in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, before gaining employment with the National Park Service in 2001. He is an active member of the Organization of American Historians, the Society for the History of Technology, and the National Council on Public History. Roach is from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; he and his wife live in Centerville, Ohio.