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.
Daniel Mainzer
I am 78 years of age and have been a photographer since I was 12. In the meantime, I collected a Political Science degree from Muskingum University in 1968 and worked at various jobs till 1976 when Firestone employed me as a photographer. After four years and some months, I stepped off the deck of that sinking ship into a photographers job at Stouffer's foods.…
Read MoreI am 78 years of age and have been a photographer since I was 12. In the meantime, I collected a Political Science degree from Muskingum University in 1968 and worked at various jobs till 1976 when Firestone employed me as a photographer. After four years and some months, I stepped off the deck of that sinking ship into a photographers job at Stouffer’s foods. That lasted almost three years, and next I became a photographer at General Tire, which transformed itself into GenCorp, a new corporate structure. This turned out to be important because they urged me to start my own studio after 4+ years by letting me and 300 others go after a takeover bid. That was 1987, and I hit the ground running, freelancing for GenCorp and adding many clients to date.
An unexpected benefit from the 10 years in the rubber industry was a large body of work documenting the life of the workers and the destruction of the factories. Being a self-taught and photographer, I felt compelled to do this and felt I was operating in the same vein as Lewis Hine, Paul Strand and others who documented the world around them. At least there is a record of the factory work and the people who did it. Some of this photography has been published (1998) in a book ‘Wheels of Fortune’, a history of the rubber industry in Akron published by the Akron university Press. It is my hope that this body of work will be recognized and find a permanent home so people will remember their legacy.
Most of my work is commercial: studio product shots, location events, industrial, advertising and auto racing photography. The racing photography started when General Tire began a motorsports program in 1984, and is now a third of our current business. A branch of the business is panoramic stadium shots for professional and collegiate football and baseball. This started when my wife took a print of the Indians baseball stadium, Jacobs Field, to work and came home with 50+ print orders. I was the official photographer for the All American Soap Box Derby from 1980-2012.
Throughout my career I have always photographed landscapes, flowers, and the world in general. Being a self- taught photographer has allowed me to enjoy it as an avocation, in addition to my vocation; something I will always do. From 1969 to 1976, I assigned myself to make a finished b/w print a day and with few exceptions stuck to this routine until accepting my position at Firestone.
Landscapes have always been a relaxation to me even though they demand scouting, great light, technique, and patience. My commercial clients purchased the few landscapes that we displayed in the studio, and thus the move into gallery sales, shows and some contests.
I would like to have viewers feel as if they were standing next to me as i first see and photograph a scene. It is like we experience the impact of what we are seeing together. This is not about me in any way, but what i want to share with the viewer in terms of emotion, the beauty of the world we live in and whatever we feel viewing what i have done.
Amit Majmudar
AMIT MAJMUDAR is a poet, novelist, essayist, translator, and the former first Poet Laureate of Ohio. He works as a diagnostic and nuclear radiologist and lives in Westerville, Ohio, with his wife and three children. He is the author of seventeen books so far in a variety of categories, with different bodies of work published in the United States and in India.
POETRY: His poetry collections include 0’, 0’ (Northwestern, 2009), shortlisted for the Norma Faber First Book Award; and Heaven and Earth (2011, Storyline Press), which won the Donald Justice Prize. These volumes were followed by Dothead (Knopf, 2016) and What He Did in Solitary (Knopf, 2020). His poems have won the Pushcart Prize and have appeared in the Norton Introduction to Literature, The New Yorker, and numerous Best American Poetry anthologies as well as journals and magazines across the United States, UK, India, and Australia. Majmudar also edited, at Knopf’s invitation, a political poetry anthology entitled Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now. Majmudar’s forthcoming volume, a hybrid of prose, drama, and poetry, is Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2024).
NONFICTION: Majmudar’s essays have appeared in Marginalia at the Los Angeles Review of Books, where he is a contributing editor, as well as The Best American Essays 2018, The New York Times, and the Times of India, among several other publications. His collection of essays, focusing on Indian religious philosophy, history, and mythology, is Black Avatar and Other Essays (Acre Books, 2023). Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023) is a memoir, in prose and verse, about his son’s struggle with congenital heart disease.
FICTION: Majmudar’s work as a novelist includes two works of historical fiction centered around the 1947 Partition of India, Partitions (Holt/Metropolitan, 2011) and The Map and the Scissors (HarperCollins India, 2022). His first children’s book also focuses on Indian history and is entitled Heroes the Colour of Dust (Puffin India, 2022). Majmudar has also penned a tragicomic, magical realist fable of Indian soldiers during World War I, Soar (Penguin India, 2020). The Abundance (Holt/Metropolitan, 2013), by contrast, is a work of contemporary realism exploring Indian-American life. Majmudar’s long-form fiction has garnered rave reviews from NPR’s All Things Considered, The Wall Street Journal, Good Housekeeping, and The Economist, as well as starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist; his short fiction won a 2017 O. Henry Prize.
MYTHOLOGY: Majmudar’s work in Hindu mythology includes a polyphonic Ramayana retelling, Sitayana (Penguin India, 2019), and The Book of Vows (Penguin India, 2023), the first volume in a trilogy that retells the ancient epic poem, Mahabharata. The forthcoming volumes are entitled The Book of Discoveries and The Book of Killings. He has also composed a forthcoming original mythological story cycle called The Later Adventures of Hanuman (Penguin India, 2024).
TRANSLATION: His work as a translator includes Godsong: A Verse Translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, with Commentary (Knopf, 2018), available both in the United States and India.
Charles Malone
Charles Malone grew up in rural Northeastern Ohio, headed west to the Rockies, came back to the Great Lakes, and has loved all of it. His first full-length collection, Working Hypothesis, is out with Finishing Line Press in 2020. His chapbook “Questions About Circulation” was published by Driftwood Press as part of the Adrift Chapbook Series. He edited the collection “A Poetic Inventory of Rocky Mountain National Park” with Wolverine Farm Publishing and has work recently published or forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, The Best of Boneshaker: A Bicycling Almanac, The Sugar House Review, The Dunes Review, and Saltfront. Charles now works at the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University coordinating community outreach programs.
Dr. Peter Mansoor
Dr. Peter Mansoor, Colonel, U.S. Army (Retired), is the General Raymond E. Mason, Jr. Chair of Military History at The Ohio State University. He assumed this position in September 2008 after a 26-year career in the U.S. Army that culminated in his service as the executive officer to General David Petraeus, the Commanding General of Multi-National Force-Iraq.…
Read MoreDr. Peter Mansoor, Colonel, U.S. Army (Retired), is the General Raymond E. Mason, Jr. Chair of Military History at The Ohio State University. He assumed this position in September 2008 after a 26-year career in the U.S. Army that culminated in his service as the executive officer to General David Petraeus, the Commanding General of Multi-National Force-Iraq. A 1982 distinguished graduate of the United States Military Academy, Col. Mansoor served in a variety of command and staff positions in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East during his military career. Dr. Mansoor holds a Masters and Ph.D. in military history from The Ohio State University, a Masters in Strategic Studies from the Army War College, and a Bachelor of Science degree from the United States Military Academy. He is the author of The GI Offensive in Europe: The Triumph of American Infantry Divisions, 1941-1945, winner of the Society for Military History distinguished book award and the Army Historical Society distinguished book award in 2000; and Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander’s War in Iraq, winner of the Ohioana Library Association nonfiction book of the year award in 2009. His most recent work is Surge, a finalist for the inaugural Guggenheim-Lehrman Military History Prize.
Paul Many
Maybe it’s happened to you: Waking from troubled dreams, you find you’ve turned into a scaly, scary T. rex. No? Lucky. For this is exactly what happens to Gregory in my picture book, Dinomorphosis. And this on the very day of his big class presentation, no less! Gregory tries to make believe that nothing is wrong, blundering through with his clumsy, scaly body and voice the level of ROAR, until his classmates and an understanding teacher finally come to his rescue.
Paul Many wrote Dinomorphosisis for those of us who don’t have a good day every day and are sometimes surprised about who we see in the mirror. He’s the author of five previous children’s books, one of which won a Los Angeles Times’ Best Children’s Book of the Year, and has appeared on the NBC national Today show promoting another. His hardcover YA books have been reprinted in paper and translated into three languages including Danish (!). He has an MFA in creative writing and a chapbook of poems among other publications. His PhD dissertation, “The Effect of Advertising on Consumer Press Credibility” has sold two copies.
Jacqueline Marino
Jacqueline Marino teaches feature writing and other courses in the magazine sequence at Kent State University’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Her nonfiction stories and essays have appeared in many publications including Cleveland Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, and River Teeth: A Journal of Narrative Nonfiction.
Stephen Markley
Stephen Markley is an author, screenwriter, and journalist. His previous books include the memoir “Publish This Book” and the travelogue “Tales of Iceland.” His short fiction, interviews, essays, and journalism can be found scattered across the internet.
Allison and Wayne Marks
English majors who met in a college Chaucer class, husband and wife Wayne and Allison Marks share a love for words and revel in a tale well-told. They enjoy spinning tales from the porch of their 100-year-old home in Akron, Ohio, where they raised twins, Elliott and Claire.
Sieglinde Martin
Sieglinde Martin was born 1940 at the beginning of World War II in Langenfeld/Rheinland, Germany. She completed her primary and secondary education in post-war Germany. In 1964 she came to the U.S. for a post-graduate traineeship in physical therapy. After meeting and marrying her husband Gerhard E. Martin, a neurologist from Danzig (now Gdansk), they made their home in Columbus. Here they worked and raised their four children.
Sieglinde Martin received a Masters of Science degree from OSU and worked as a pediatric physical therapist in a variety of setting. She previously published the book Teaching Motor Skills to Children with Cerebral Palsy and Similar Movement Disorders: A Guide for Parents and Professionals that has been published into several languages.
Now widowed and retired Sieglinde Martin enjoys spending time with her four grandchildren. She is an active member of Central Ohioans for Peace, the Worthington Hills Garden Club and Columbus Folk Dancers.
Six narrators of Small Feet on the Run live in Columbus, one in Boston, one in Canada and the others in Germany.
Melissa Martin
Melissa Martin, Ph.D., is a clinical child therapist with experience as a play therapist, adjunct professor,
workshop leader and trainer, and behavioral health consultant. Her specializations include mental health trauma treatment, EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), and expressive therapies. A self-syndicated newspaper columnist, she writes about children’s mental health issues and parenting. Melissa lives in Ohio.