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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Theofania Music
Theofania Music is a classically trained lifetime pianist and composer since the age of four. As a lifelong writer and photographer, her photography and vulnerable poetry have only privately accompanied her compositions until now!
Theofania’s lifetime of manuscripts, prints, and compositions thus far, made for an idea of this compilation of poetry and photography.…
Read MoreTheofania Music is a classically trained lifetime pianist and composer since the age of four. As a lifelong writer and photographer, her photography and vulnerable poetry have only privately accompanied her compositions until now!
Theofania’s lifetime of manuscripts, prints, and compositions thus far, made for an idea of this compilation of poetry and photography. She encompasses a commitment to tell the story through light and sound, and to awaken and evoke feelings and thoughts to the listener and reader.
Theofania Music’s life’s work is transforming light and sound with a hope to connect humanity with nature. She has decades of experience creating a unique individual genre of “Raw-Piano”. Theofania Music has released five albums and three singles… all available on various musical platforms. Her single Perfect Geometry is reaching far beyond her expectations.
She is a gallery solo artist who brings a unique journey to the public, exhibiting her photography and music. A Vinyasa, Hatha, and Yin Yoga practitioner and instructor, Theofania believes that the journey of music, art, and literature runs through us all in mind, body, and soul. Theofania is currently recording new albums to be released while fine-tuning her composed classical full-length musical Symphony. Her composing continues, and her writings continue as a life’s-long novel is in the works.
Feel free to connect to Theofania Music at http://www.theofaniamusic.com @theofaniamusic on social media platforms.
“As long as I am able, I wish to share with all of humanity, the beauty in everything which I can hear and see.” – Theofania Music
“Everything is Connected” – Theofania Music
ENDURE MY COMPANY by THEOFANIA MUSIC
The complete first edition of poetry and photography from piano composer Theofania Music.
Have you ever desired to know what a composer thinks of at the time in which they compose a piece of music? Have you wondered what a music’s journey would be like from the moment a composer hears or sees a melody to when you hear the music? This is a glimpse into a composer’s life using poetry and photography.
Theofania Music walks alongside the reader… sharing emotional moments and imaginative awareness through each turned page. These poetic works evoke feelings of love and life, of beauty and sadness, of isolation and romance, of equations and time, of awakening and humanity, and so many more issues and passions.
The reader is able to walk with the composer through nature, allowing an incredible experience of poetical ideas and elusive thoughts, from constructing images through words and sound. At the same time, Theofania Music shows the reader to see the music of the prose as she weaves reflection and light in the form of photography.
A true journey of light and sound is experienced as composer Theofania Music opens a door to her world, hands you a cup of coffee or tea, and shares playful, philosophical ideas, extraordinary photography, and seriously vulnerable and intellectual poetry.
Deni Naffziger
Deni Naffziger is the author of Desire to Stay, poems (Stockport Flats Press, 2014), Strange Bodies, poems (Shadelandhouse Modern Press, 2023), and she co-authored Revenants: A Story of Many Lives, which was commissioned by the Houston-Hardin school district and supported with an Ohio Arts Council special projects grant. She edited Riverwind literary magazine, a national publication out of Hocking College, from 1986 – 2003. Naffziger, a Fulbright Scholar, is a retired professor (Hocking College, Ohio University). She currently serves as poet-in-residence at the Passion Works Collaborative Arts Studio in Athens, Ohio.
Marilyn Nelson
Marilyn Nelson is the author of many award-winning books, including Carver: A Life in Poems, which was a National Book Award finalist, a Newbery Honor Book, and a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and received the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award and the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award. She is also the author of A Wreath for Emmett Till, which garnered the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, a Coretta Scott King Honor, a Printz Honor, and a Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award Honor. She lives in Connecticut. https://marilyn-nelson.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).
Jay Nesbit
Jay grew up in University Heights, Ohio, and has also lived in Detroit, Michigan and North Padre Island, Texas. He received a pharmacy degree from The Ohio State University, and an MBA from Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi. He is married with two adult children and two grandchildren. Jay was Clinical Assistant Professor of Pharmacy Practice for Northeast Ohio Medical University. An entrepreneur, he owned a pharmacy, a travel magazine, and a trophy & awards business. He has also been a real estate investor, and owns several investment homes and condominiums. Jay currently works full-time as a content creator and author, and part-time as a behavioral health pharmacist. Jay lives in Cleveland, and in St. Petersburg, Florida, during the winter months. During his leisure time, you can find Jay exploring the latest arrivals at local libraries and bookstores. He also enjoys savoring a Cleveland Orchestra concert at Severance Hall, or immersing himself in new exhibits at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Jay, alongside his wife Joyce, enjoys attending weekly summer programs at Chautauqua Institution in southwestern New York state.
Megan Neville
Megan Neville is a writer and educator based in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has appeared in West Branch, Pleiades, Poets.org, Wildness, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. She was the winner of the 2021 Trio award and the 2019 Wick Poetry Center Contest for Peace & Transformation, and has been a finalist or semifinalist for the Write Bloody Book Contest, the Akron Poetry Prize, the Frost Place Chapbook Contest, the Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Contest, the YesYes Books 2020 Open Reading Period, and others. In 2021 received a Best of the Net nomination and two nominations for the Pushcart Prize. Her full-length poetry collection The Fallow is available from Trio House Press. Megan is also an editorial assistant for Split Lip Magazine. Follow her on Twitter @MegNev. Learn more at: https://megannevillepoetry.com/
Mary Newman
Mary A. Newman PhD, is the co-author of Cherry, Edible Flowers: A Global History, and Coconut: A Global History (forthcoming in 2022), with her sister, Constance Kirker. Mary has taught at Ohio University, the University of Malta, and Silpakorn University in Thailand, the latter two as a Fulbright Specialist.
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.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Aimee Nezhukumatathil (neh-ZOO / KOO-mah / tah-TILL) is the author of the New York Times best-selling illustrated collection of nature essays and Kirkus Prize finalist, WORLD OF WONDERS: IN PRAISE OF FIREFLIES, WHALE SHARKS, & OTHER ASTONISHMENTS (2020, Milkweed Editions), which was chosen as Barnes and Noble’s Book of the Year. She has four previous poetry collections: OCEANIC (Copper Canyon Press, 2018), LUCKY FISH (2011), AT THE DRIVE-IN VOLCANO (2007), and MIRACLE FRUIT (2003), the last three from Tupelo Press. Her most recent chapbook is LACE & PYRITE, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Tin House.
Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, a Mississippi Arts Council grant, and being named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. In 2021, she became the first-ever poetry editor for SIERRA magazine, the story-telling arm of The Sierra Club. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.
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).