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): Fiction
Elizabeth Neal
Elizabeth Neal is a writer, editor, and digital strategist who lives in Columbus, OH, with her husband, daughter, and two rescue mutts.
Paula Johnson Neal
Paula Johnson Neal is a graduate of The Ohio State University with a degree in early childhood development. Prior to becoming a published children’s author in 2019, she was a preschool administrator for 25 years. Based on her direct observation of young children exhibiting actual or precursors behaviors to bullying, Paula has set out on a mission to create fun and educational children’s books to teach kindness and self-regulatory skills. Paula’s first award winning book is titled I’M GONNA HAVE A GOOD DAY! The sequel, BREATHE, GABBY, BREATHE is a roller coaster of BIG emotions and usage of a breathing strategy to grow the main character and her readers. To learn more about Paula and her books, please visit her website at http://www.PaulaJohnsonNeal.com.
Michael Neno
Columbus native Michael Neno has been writing, drawing, and publishing comic books, coloring books, zines, and minicomics for over thirty-five years. Michael has written (and also drawn) for Cracked Magazine, Caliber Comics, Ohio’s Amazing Montage Press, Silver Comics, Columbus’ Weinland Park Stories anthology, contributed to a comics anthology on Washington, D.C. history, ReDistricted, written and drawn projects for Columbus’ Wild Goose Creative, and written about Columbus history in The Columbus Scribbler.
Among the books and publications he’s published are two issues of The Signifiers, the minicomics Michael Neno’s Dream, Michael Neno’s Life-Changing Guide to Decluttering Your Comic Book Collection, What to Do When Approached by a Creepy Clown and The Toy Box. He’s also written two issues of the music review zine, Abba Zab and wrote/published a set of ten public domain mashup microcomics during the pandemic.
Along with creating graphic designs for concert posters, album covers, illustrating magazines, children’s books and freelance lettering, penciling, inking and coloring for various publishers,
he also regularly writes reviews for the website: Film Review Central.
Among the awards he has won are the Governor’s Award of Excellence in 1980 for the painting The Visit and a 2022 SPACE (Small Press and Alternative Comics Expo) Lifetime Achievement Award. He also received a Xeric Grant from Peter Laird (co-creator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) for the publication of his comic book Reactionary Tales in 2001. The book featured an introduction written and drawn by Ohio-born cartoonist Paul Pope (Batman Year 100).
Judy Carey Nevin
JUDY CAREY NEVIN twice received a fortune from a NYC fortune cookie that read “You are a lover of words. You will someday write a book.” Judy never expected that fortune to come true, but the sale of her debut picture book, WHAT DADDIES LIKE, has sealed her fate. Her sensibilities lean toward texts for the very young, especially preschoolers. Judy works as a library director in Ohio, where she lives with her family. Please visit Judy at: http://www.judycareynevin.com
Susie Newman
Susie Newman lives in Westerville, Ohio with her family. Following her lifelong dream of being a writer, Susie finds creative ways to write full-time. She is a licensed wedding and funeral celebrant, and started Simply I Do Ceremonies. Susie inscribes and performs customized ceremonies and personalized memorials. This job allows her to write the real everyday life and love stories and recite it to the ones involved. When Susie wanted to write a book about a haunted cafe, she took a job as a waitress in a cafe & bakery (Mozart’s in Clintonville) and began writing her inspirations and thoughts on a server pad, in-betweeen customers and shifts. What started out as chicken scratches on a waitress tablet is now the novel, Lost Souls Cafe.
Celeste Ng
Celeste Ng is the number one New York Times bestselling author of the novels Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere, and Our Missing Hearts. Ng is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and her work has been published in over thirty languages. To learn more about her, visit celesteng.com or follow her on Twitter (@pronounced_ing).
Melica Niccole
Melica Niccole is a native resident of Columbus, Ohio where she is an mother, author, poet, and Vocational Rehabilitation Counselor. Growing up on the Southeast Side of Columbus, she attended schools such as: Livingston Elementary, Barrett Middle, and Briggs High Schools. She also lived in New Jersey for approximately five years, where she co-founded an annual Children’s Book Festival in Camden, New Jersey, collected over 250 children’s books for book drives, collected book bags for a New York elementary school, and participated in local events.
She developed a fondness of writing and creating things at an early age. Writing was a creative expressive technique that she used to talk about various subject matters, such as relationships, domestic violence, friendships, and more. These subjects were mainly expressed in the form poetry.
After graduating from college, Melica sought to be a published author. Although she did not become a published author right after her undergraduate work at Otterbein University, the drive and determination within her stayed the same. She has performed in front of audiences at The National Black Book Festival, Inspired Word NYC, The Ohio State University, Newark Public Library (New Jersey), Laughin & Loungin, Writing Wrongs Poetry open mic events, and other places around the country. Her hard work finally paid off in August of 2010 when she released her first book titled, Dead Wrong. She has written 22 books/Kindle Vellas with 2 Children’s Books in development.
Melica has a Master’s Degree in Science Administration with a concentration in Health Services and a certificate in Human Resources from Central Michigan University. Her Bachelor’s of Arts Degree is in Health Promotion and Fitness from Otterbein University. In 2012, she was deemed the first alumni to receive the Author of the Month distinction at Otterbein. She was then awarded the Diversity (2018) and Leadership and Citizenship Awards (2019) from Otterbein as well, due to her work with planning and creating programming and collecting literacy items for disadvantaged populations. In 2022, Melica participated in Otterbein’s first African-American Read-In Program, which was an initiative developed by the National Council of Teachers of English. The initiative allows various schools and organizations to create similar programs based on their resources.
Melica loves living outside the box and creating new and exciting things. She believes that anything is possible with passion and determination. She has worked with individuals with Developmental Disabilities, Mental Health Diagnosis, At-risk youth, children, and various populations for about 15 years.
Stacy Nockowitz
Stacy Nockowitz is a middle school librarian and former language arts teacher with 30+ years of experience in middle grade education. She holds Master’s Degrees from Columbia University and Kent State University, and is an MFA candidate in Writing for Children and Young Adults at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her debut middle grade novel, The Prince of Steel Pier (Kar-Ben), won the 2022 National Jewish Book Award for Middle Grade Literature and was named a Sydney Taylor Book Award Notable Book for 2023. The Prince of Steel Pier was a PJ Our Way selection for October 2022, and Stacy received a PJ Library Author Incentive Award in 2020. Find her on Twitter @snockowitz or visit http://www.stacynockowitz.com.
Richard J. Norgard
R.J. Norgard was born and raised on Port Clinton, Ohio, a stone’s throw from the shores of Lake Erie. He began working as a reporter and photographer for the local newspaper while still in high school before embarking on a career in the U.S. Army in the field of counterintelligence. Upon his retirement, he went into business as a private investigator in Alaska, work that would later proved invaluable when he penned his first detective novel, Trophy Kill. After spending 21 years in Alaska, he has returned to his hometown where he devotes his time to writing as well as volunteering in he local community. As president of the Port Clinton Lighthouse Conservancy, he a written a book-length history of the of the town’s historic pier lighthouse. He resides with his partner, Suzy, on Catawba Island and is currently working on his second Sidney Reed novel.