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
Merry Robert
Robert W. Merry is the author of Where They Stand; A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk; Sands of Empire; and Taking on the World. A longtime Washington journalist, commentator, and publishing executive, he covered government and politics for The Wall Street Journal for a decade and spent twenty-two years as an executive at Congressional Quarterly Inc., including twelve years as CEO. This is his fifth book. Merry lives with his wife in Langley, WA, and Washington, DC.
Debra Robinson
Debra Robinson is an author, psychic and professional musician/songwriter. She speaks on the ancient art and science of palmistry, psychic abilities, and has thriving careers in music performance and publishing. Most recently a song from her catalogue was placed in the Matthew McConaughey film trailer, Killer Joe. Debra’s first book A Haunted Life: The True Ghost Story of a Reluctant Psychic, was released by Llewellyn Worldwide in 2013. Her latest book with Llewellyn, The Dead are Watching: More Ghost Stories from a Reluctant Psychic, is both heartwarming and terrifying. It includes stories of loved ones’ returns as well as true life hauntings. She recently signed a three-book deal with Permuted Press for her paranormal fiction. The Haunting of Black Tower Mansion will be released April 2015. Sarah’s Shadows will be re-released May 2015 and the sequel to Sarah’s Shadows June 2015. Debra lives in New Philadelphia Ohio, in a haunted house.
David Rohr
Born and raised in Ohio, David Rohr spent his working career in the state until the
age of 29. Even though he’s been a resident of other states since then—New York and
Tennessee—David remains a frequent Buckeye State visitor, as most of his immediate
family still resides there. He is an enthusiastic fan of Ohio State Buckeye football as
well as of many other Ohio college and professional sports teams.
His advertising and marketing communications career includes writing, creative
direction, and management for a number of advertising agencies and
communications firms. He has served clients ranging from those on the Fortune 500
to smaller companies and human services organizations. This career, as David likes to
point out, enabled him to write everything from rap songs about pastries to fulllength
books promoting multi-million dollar printing equipment. He is also an
entrepreneur, teacher, and father of three.
David is a proud graduate of Ottawa Hills High School (Toledo). In addition, he has a
B.S. in Journalism from Bowling Green State University, an M.S. in Management and
an M.A. in Liberal Studies, both from Nazareth College of Rochester plus a graduate
certificate from Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Stepfanie Romine
Born and raised in Ohio, Stepfanie Romine is a cookbook author, health coach and yoga teacher who has lived and cooked on three continents. After spending a year teaching English in South Korea and later discovering Ashtanga yoga, she turned her passion for health and wellness into a career. For several years, Stepfanie was the editorial director for the online healthy living community SparkPeople.com, then she worked as a copywriter and recipe developer for an herbal products manufacturer in western North Carolina. She now writes about natural health and wellness and teaches cooking classes in the Asheville area.
Stepfanie has been a registered yoga teacher since 2009, and she is also a certified health coach through the American Council on Exercise. She has completed courses in herbal supplements, ayurveda and holistic and integrative nutrition.
Cooking helped Stepfanie lose 40 pounds over a decade ago — and she’s kept it off ever since. Today she cooks healthy, seasonal, plant-based meals to fuel her running and her husband’s long-distance road cycling. Stepfanie is the co-author of The No Meat Athlete Cookbook, The SparkPeople Cookbook and The Spark Solution.
Find her at The Flexible Kitchen, or connect with her via Instagram, Twitter or Facebook.
A.J. Romriell
AJ Romriell is a Pushcart-nominated writer and educator, originally from Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the author of Wolf Act (2025), a memoir that earned first prize in the Utah Original Writing Competition and was a finalist for the Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Contest. His essays, stories, and poems have been featured in The Missouri Review, Black Warrior Review, Brevity, New Delta Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Utah, he is now a Presidential Fellow at The Ohio State University where he writes about queerness, fairy tales, video games, apocalypse narratives, HIV, and more. When not writing, he can be found making a mean latte or playing hide and seek with his cat.
Mike Roos
Mike Roos is Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College, where he has been employed since 1976. He grew up in southern Indiana and played basketball for Tell City High School, graduating in 1970. He worked for two years as a sportswriter for the Tell City News. In addition to having published numerous scholarly articles, he is also a singer-songwriter and has released three albums of his own material.
Read MoreMike Roos is Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College, where he has been employed since 1976. He grew up in southern Indiana and played basketball for Tell City High School, graduating in 1970. He worked for two years as a sportswriter for the Tell City News. In addition to having published numerous scholarly articles, he is also a singer-songwriter and has released three albums of his own material.
Michael J. Rosen
In his various roles, Michael has created more than 150 books over a forty- year career. His wide range of books for young readers range from Chanukah Lights, a poetic collaboration with pop-up master Robert Sabuda (Candlewick) to Our Farm: Four Seasons with Five Kids on One Family’s Farm (Darby Creek/Lerner), a 144-page oral history of an Ohio farm family that he photo-chronicled and supplemented with sidebars of local- and natural history.
Many of his books engage his degree in zoology, medical-school training, and his passion for nature and the creatures who share this world. For the last 22 years, he’s lived on 100 forested acres in the foothills of the Appalachians, east of Columbus, Ohio, where he spent most of his life. Workman Publishing released three volumes of heavily researched writing: his comprehensive, go-to-handbook, My Dog! A Kids’ Guide to Keeping a Happy, Healthy Dog; his eco-wise guide to freshwater fishing, Kids’ Book of Fishing; and The 60-Second Encyclopedia, a witty fact- and math-packed compendium of minute-measurements that come from nearly every subject area. Candlewick published four volumes of jos haiku with natural-history endnotes on birds, on cats, on dogs, and on horses. His latest book from Doubleday, In the Quiet, NOISY Woods, is a cumulative sound narrative of eight creatures who share his acres.
Fifteen of his books including SPEAK!, Down to Earth, and The Greatest Table (Harcourt), and Home (HarperCollins) were created with the generosity of hundreds of the country’s best-known illustrators, photographers, authors, and cartoonists as creative philanthropy. Along with several adult books, profits from these collections benefitted Share Our Strength’s work to end childhood hunger and a granting program Rosen created, The Company of Animals Fund, that awarded over $375,000 to 100 animal-welfare organizations.
Among the many distinguished citations his work have received are:
• The Sydney Taylor Book Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries for Chanukah Lights. (Candlewick)
• The inaugural Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance Once Upon a World Book Award for the best children’s book that promotes diversity and tolerance for A School for Pompey Walker. (Harcourt) This is a book-length, first-person narrative based on the true story of a man who repeatedly sold himself into and escaped from slavery in order to build a school for children in Ohio.
• The Ohioana Library Career Citation awarded by the state of Ohio.
• The National Jewish Book Award for Elijah’s Angel, a picture book based on Rosen’s friendship with the renowned folk artist Elijah Pierce.
• Share Our Strength’s first lifetime achievement away for his creative and devotion to ending childhood hunger in America.
Several of his books have been Junior Library Guild featured selections and Scholastic Book Club picks, while others have been featured as “Best Books of the Year” by Kirkus, CCBC, Bank Street Books, Hungry Mind Review, Essence, The Today Show, The Horn Book, Miami Herald, and the ASPCA. His works have been adapted as a PBS documentary (“Our Farm: Four Seasons with Five Kids on One Family Farm”); a family opera (composer Robert Kapilow’s “Elijah’s Angel”); and a short film (director Christopher Rowley’s “The Remembering Movies”).
Among his recent books are Sailing the Unknown: Around the World with Captain Cook, a free-verse diary based on the life of a stowaway who sailed aboard the ship Endeavor for over a thousand days. (Creative Editions)
• Mind-Boggling Numbers (Millbrook/Lerner). Ms. Mary Math unpacks a dozen doozies in a humorous, arithmetic ramp through such unlikely story problems as how long would it take to hike to the moon, how many earthworms are in an acre, and how long would it take someone to mow the lawn if everyone on Earth had the same size yard.
• Outrageous Animal Adaptations (Twenty-first Century Books/Lerner), a middle-grade guide to two dozen profiles of creatures who occupy the most extreme, hazardous, and competitive niches on the planet.
• The Tale of Rescue (Candlewick), a short novel about a cattle dog who heroically saves a family lost in an Ohio blizzard—“a lovely prose-poem adventure,” wrote Publishers’ Weekly in a starred review.
Michael has been active in professional development, writers’ residencies, curriculum development, and creative-writing workshops with readers, writers, and teachers for over 40 years, including 20 years as program director of the Thurber House, a literary center in Columbus, Ohio. His fifth and sixth collection of Thurber’s uncollected and unpublished works were published in conjunction with the humorist’s 125th birthday: Collected Fables (HarperCollins) and A Mile and a Half of Lines: The Art of James Thurber (Ohio State University Press).
Steven Rosen
Steven Rosen has worked for the Cincinnati Enquirer, Denver Post, Cincinnati CityBeat and other newspapers. Among his assignments, he served as Arts & Culture editor at Cincinnati CityBeat and the art and film critic (and a music writer) at the Denver Post. As a freelancer, he has written for Cincinnati Magazine, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, American Songwriter, Documentary Magazine, IndiWire, Variety, Blurt, Rock & Roll Globe and other outlets. He also founded National One Hit Wonder Day and started a music fanzine called One Shot. He is a member of the Cincinnati Vinyl Club and the Rock & Read Music Book Discussion Group. He holds a Bachelor in General Studies degree from University of Michigan and a Master of Science in Journalism degree from Northwestern University. He and his wife, Mindy, live in Cincinnati. https://www.stevenrosen.net/
Aimee Ross
Aimee Ross is a nationally award-winning educator and aspiring writer who’s been teaching high school English at her alma mater in Loudonville, Ohio, for the past twenty-six years. Aimee just published her first book, Permanent Marker: A Memoir (KiCam Projects, March 2018), but she has also had her writing published on TheManifestStation.net, NextAvenue.org, http://www.lifein10minutes.com, and http://www.SixHens.Com, as well as in Beauty around the World: A Cultural Encyclopedia (ABC-Clio, 2017); Scars: An Anthology (Et Alia Press, 2015); Today I Made a Difference: A Collection of Inspirational Stories from America’s Top Educators (Adams Media, 2009); and Teaching Tolerance magazine. Her passion for learning and teaching about the Holocaust has led to fellowships and study tours, published study guides and lessons (online and print), and numerous presentations, both nationally and internationally. She completed her MFA in Creative Non-Fiction Writing at Ashland University in 2014. Learn more about Aimee at https://theaimeeross.com/.
Julie K. Rubini
Julie K. Rubini loves to share the incredible stories of individuals who made a difference in the world with younger readers. Her works include Virginia Hamilton: America’s Storyteller, which received a Kirkus starred review and listed on Bank Street College of Education’s Best Children’s Books, Outstanding Merit. Julie’s most recent project was serving as the editor for Virginia Hamilton: Five Novels, a collection published by the Library of America.Julie and her husband Brad established Claire’s Day, a children’s book festival in honor of their daughter.
Julie is the recipient of the Toledo Area Jefferson Award (2015), the YWCA Milestones Award (2016) and the University of Toledo Outstanding Alumna Award (2015). To learn more, visit http://www.julierubini.com or http://www.clairesday.org