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): Poetry
Teri Ellen Cross Davis
Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of Haint, published by Gival Press. She is a Cave Canem fellow and has attended the Soul Mountain Writer’s Retreat, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is on the Advisory Committee for the biennial Split This Rock Festival and is a semi-finalist judge for the NEA’s Poetry Out Loud. She is part of the Black Ladies Brunch Collective. Her work can be read in many anthologies including Bum Rush The Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade, Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC; The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks and Not Without Our Laughter: poems of joy, humor, and sexuality and the following journals Poet Lore, The North American Review, Gargoyle, Natural Bridge, Torch, Fledgling Rag, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Delaware Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Tin House and Auburn Avenue. She coordinates the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series at the Folger Shakespeare Library and lives in Silver Spring, MD, with her husband poet Hayes Davis and their two children. Their website is http://www.poetsandparents.com.
Ajanaé Dawkins
Ajanaé is a poet, conceptual artist and theologian. She works through poetry, visual art, performance, and audio to explore the politics of faith, grief, and intimate relationships between Black women. As a theologian, she blends cultural criticism, memoir, and theology as autotheory to consider the relationship between Black church history, spirituality, and creation. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, the Indiana Review, Frontier Poetry, The BreakBeat Poets Black Girl Magic Anthology and more. Her solo-exhibition, No One Teaches Us How To Be Daughters, debuted at Urban Arts Space in 2024. Her chapbook, BLOOD-FLEX, won the New Delta Review’s Chapbook prize and is forthcoming in Spring 2025. Ajanaé has performed for the United Nations Secretary of Sexual Violence in Conflict. She contributed to the Solomon R. Guggenheim’s Poetry is Not a Luxury project, led by Ama Codjoe. Her work has been featured on PBS, For Harriet, and Def Jam. She is the winner of the Tinderbox Poetry Journal’s Editors Prize. She was the Taft Museum’s 2022 Duncanson Artist in Residence and is a fellow of Torch Literary, The Watering Hole, and Pink Door. Ajanaé is currently a co-host of the VS Podcast with the Poetry Foundation, and Ohio State University’s UAS Community Artist-in-Residence. Learn more at: https://www.ajanaedawkins.com/
Mark M. Dean
Local children’s literature author, Mark M. Dean, has recently released his anticipated children’s book Bedtime for Bigfoot. The first book in a series, this new release adds to Mark’s impressive portfolio. Mark and his family reside on a charming horse farm nestled in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in southeast Ohio. Mark is a versatile author with seven books to his name, spanning children’s literature (Charlie the Catfish, Doggy Deck Day, Fancy Flowers by Faye, and Good Habits Rabbits), short stories (Hands Over Time), and poetry (Poetic Justice). His latest venture, Bedtime For Bigfoot, marks the beginning of an exciting series on the legendary Bigfoot. Dean’s literary excellence has earned him a four-time induction into the Ohioana Book Library and Festival and recognition as a “Readers Favorite Five Star” author. When he’s not crafting compelling stories, Mark can be found tending to his family’s hobby farm, boating on the Ohio River, playing his Irish Tenor Banjo, or practicing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. All of Dean’s books are available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other fine bookstores. For more information or to schedule a book event or interview, please visit http://www.mondaycreekpublishing.com or by mail at:
Monday Creek Publishing
PO Box 399
Buchtel, Ohio 45716
Darren Demaree
Darren C. Demaree is the author of twenty-three poetry collections, most recently So Much More (Harbor Editions, November 2024). He is the recipient of a Greater Columbus Arts Council Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the editor-in-chief of the Best of the Net Anthology and the managing editor of Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently working in the Columbus Metropolitan Library system. https://darrencdemaree.com/
John Philip Drury
John Philip Drury is the author of six collections of poetry: The Stray Ghost (State Street Press Chapbooks, 1987), The Disappearing Town (Miami University Press, 2000), Burning the Aspern Papers (Miami University Press, 2003), The Refugee Camp (Turning Point Books, 2011), Sea Level Rising (Able Muse Press, 2015), and The Teller’s Cage: Poems and Imaginary Movies (Able Muse Press, 2024). His first book of narrative nonfiction is Bobby and Carolyn: A Memoir of My Two Mothers (Finishing Line Press, 2024). He has also written Creating Poetry and The Poetry Dictionary (both published by Writer’s Digest Books). His awards include an Ingram Merrill Foundation fellowship, two Ohio Arts Council grants, a Pushcart Prize, and the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review for Burning the Aspern Papers. After teaching at the University of Cincinnati for 37 years, he is now a Professor Emeritus of English and lives with his wife, fellow poet LaWanda Walters, in a hundred-year-old house on the edge of a wooded ravine.
Kathy Fagan
Kathy Fagan is the author of Bad Hobby and Sycamore, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award, as well as four previous collections including The Charm, the National Poetry Series-winning The Raft, and Vassar Miller Prize-winner MOVING & ST RAGE. A former NEA fellow, she is currently the Director of Creative Writing and the MFA program at Ohio State University, and Poetry Editor for OSU Press. Her website is http://www.kathyfagan.net.
Norman Finkelstein
Norman Finkelstein is the author of eleven books of poetry and five books of literary criticism. A widely published scholar in the fields of modern American poetry and Jewish literature, he was born in New York City in 1954, and lives in Cincinnati, where he is Professor of English at Xavier University. His most recent books of poetry are The Ratio of Reason to Magic: New & Selected Poems (Dos Madres, 2016) and From the Files of the Immanent Foundation (Dos Madres, 2018). A book of critical essays, Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry & the Jewish Literary Imagination, is forthcoming from Hebrew Union College Press in 2019.
Charlene Fix
Charlene Fix, an Emeritus English Professor at Columbus College of Art and Design, taught the writing of essays and poems, American Literature, Film and Literature, and special topics courses she created like The Artist as Protagonist, Word and Image, and Road Trip! The Picaresque Novel (and Some Films). She chaired the English and Philosophy Department for about ten years.
A member of The House of Toast Poets, a workshop and performance group, she has received poetry fellowships from both the Ohio and the Greater Columbus Arts Councils, and has published poems in various literary magazines, among them Poetry, Literary Imagination, Hotel Amerika, The Journal, The Manhattan Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Rattle, and The Cincinnati Review. She won the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award and the Louis Hammer Memorial Award from The Poetry Society of America and was a finalist once for The Lyric Poem Award. Her poem, “They Thought Our Sins Were Bread,” (in Jewgirl) was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by The Manhattan Review. Charlene is the author of two chapbooks: Mischief (Pudding House 2003) & Charlene Fix: Greatest Hits (Kattywompus 2012), and four full length collections: Flowering Bruno, a dog-besotted collection of poems with illustrations by Susan Josephson (XOXOX Press 2006 and finalist for the 2007 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry), Frankenstein’s Flowers, poems inspired by myth, books, and films (CW Books 2014), Taking a Walk in My Animal Hat, poems inhabited by the four-legged and winged nations (Bottom Dog Press, 2018), and Jewgirl (shortlisted for the Sexton Prize from Eyewear Publishing; Broadstone Books 2023), as well as a prose/homage, Harpo Marx as Trickster, a critical study of Harpo in the thirteen Marx Brothers’ films (McFarland 2013). She has published two critical essays: “Yes and Yass: Dean Moriarty’s Ecstatic and Lugubrious Affirmations in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road” (Xavier Review, February 2014), and “The Lost Father in Death of a Salesman” (Michigan Quarterly Review, summer 2008). Her poem, “What Dreams May Be” appears on the Academy of American Poets website.
Charlene is an activist for peace and social justice. Mother of three, grandmother of two, she co-coordinates Hospital Poets at the Ohio State University and Nationwide Children’s Hospitals.
Deborah Fleming
Deborah Fleming’s research interests include Anglo-Irish literature, environmental studies, and modern poetry, especially the work of William Butler Yeats, Robinson Jeffers, and Eamon Grennan. After earning her PhD in English at Ohio State University in 1985, she published “A man who does not exist”: The Irish Peasant in the Work of W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge with the University of Michigan Press and articles on Yeats, Jeffers, Grennan, Orwell, and Aldo Leopold. In 2015 she published Towers of Myth and Stone: Yeats’s Influence on Robinson Jeffers with the University of South Carolina Press. She has edited two collections of essays published by Locust Hill Press, Learning the Trade: W. B. Yeats and Contemporary Poetry and W. B. Yeats and Postcolonialism. She has published two collections of poetry, Morning, Winter Solstice (Vineyard, 2012) and Into a New Country (Cherry Grove, 2016) and two chapbooks by Finishing Line Press, Migrations (2005) and Source of the River (2018). In 2014 she published a novel, Without Leave (Black Mountain Press), winner of the Asheville Award, and in 2019 a collection of environmental essays, Resurrection of the Wild: Meditations on Ohio’s Natural Landscape with Kent State University Press. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Council of Learned Societies. Three of her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Currently she is Editor and Director of the Ashland Poetry Press.
Siaara Freeman
Siaara Freeman is from Cleveland Ohio, where she is the current Lake Erie Siren & a teaching artist for Center For Arts Inspired Learning and The Sisterhood Project in conjunction with the Anisfieldwolf Foundation. She is a 2021 Premier Playwright fellow recipient with Cleveland Public Theater. She is a 2020 WateringHole Manuscript fellow, a 2018 winter tangerine chapbook fellow and a 2018 Poetry Foundation incubator fellow. Her work appears in, The Offing, BOAAT, Tinderbox, Josephine Quarterly and elsewhere. She has toured both nationally and internationally. She is the co-founder of Outsiders Queer Midwest Writers Retreat. Chances are she’s by a lake, thinking about Toni Morrison and talking to ghosts. In her spare time she is growing her afro so tall God can use it for a microphone and speak through her. Learn more at: https://www.siaarafreeman.com/