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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Jeffrey Ebbeler
Jeffrey Ebbeler has worked as an art director, book designer, and illustrator. He is a graduate of the Art Academy of Cincinnati. After college he worked for a puppet theater sculpting marionettes and performing. He has since become a full-time freelance illustrator and has illustrated over 40 children’s books, including One Is a Feast for Mouse, Cinco de Mouse O!, Haunted House, Haunted Mouse, and Snow Day for Mouse, all by Judy Cox. He has also written and illustrated A Giant Mess and Kraken Me Up, which was named a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection.
Kathy S. Elasky
Kathy S. Elasky is a retired teacher/counselor from Southeast Ohio. She lives on a small farm with her husband, two dogs, several squirrels and the occasional raccoon or possum. Writing children’s books has been her goal from the time her children were little. She started by creating books for her grandchildren. Now she is able to share Pudgy with many others. Besides writing, Kathy loves her family, church activities, nature, reading, and crafting of all sorts. Interacting with people at speaking engagements and book events is one of her newest passions.
Tameka N. Ellington
Tameka N. Ellington is a fashion scholar, educator, and expert on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. The author of several articles and two books, she is the co-curator of the award-winning exhibition TEXTURES: the history and art of Black hair.
Cantly Elliott
Cantly Elliott is an author and creator of Blaze Review, a media group based in Columbus, OH. Cantly published his first book, Benched: Underrated Players and Teams in History in 2023. His Blaze Review platform hosts several podcasts centered around sports, music and movies. He was inspired to write his book after watching ESPN’s docuseries, The last Dance. There have been a lot of great players throughout the history of the NBA that never won a championship because of greats like Michael Jordan, LeBron James, and others. Elliott felt it was important to tell their story and highlight them.
In his spare time, Cantly enjoys working on his business, spending time with family and friends, watching sports, and shopping for records and books.
Kelcey Ervick
Kelcey Ervick is the author and illustrator of the graphic memoir, The Keeper: Soccer, Me, and the Law That Changed Women’s Lives, winner of a 2023 Ohioana Book Award. She is the author of three other award-winning books and co-editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Graphic Literature. Kelcey has a PhD from the University of Cincinnati and is a professor of English at Indiana University South Bend. Learn more about her writing and art at kelceyervick.com
Annamarie Fernyak
Annamarie Fernyak is the founder of the mindful education company, Mind Body Align. She is an award-winning community leader who lives and works to make life better in downtown Mansfield, Ohio. She is the author of The Right Side of Happiness, and is an educator, speaker, podcast guest, and writer on building resilience and living mindfully, in the present moment as the path to a life of true happiness and contentment. Mind Body Align teaches hundreds of students and educators each year how to pay focused attention, practice kindness, and share gratitude.
Annamarie is the co-author of a 16-book series for children and is the vision behind the main character, Tia, a butterfly, and Dwight, a grasshopper, two of the delightful inhabitants of a special garden labyrinth. These books teach children skills of self-regulation, how to navigate disagreement, to manage anxiety, and more. This series is set in a real-life labyrinth at Annamarie’s farm in Lucas, Ohio.
Michelle Fishpaw
Michelle Fishpaw began writing Claire’s Voice – her first book – more than a decade ago following the injury of her, daughter, Claire, who was shaken by a babysitter in her home town of Columbus, Ohio. After being in the teaching field for 20 years, she chose to pursue another career and is currently a licensed massage therapist. Michelle remains a passionate advocate in creating hope and helping others, and currently lives in Narragansett, Rhode Island. She enjoys walks on the beach, collecting sea glass and shells along the nearby coastline. For more information visit: michellefishpaw.com
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.
Julie Flanders
Julie Flanders is an academic librarian by day and a writer the rest of the time. She is also an animal lover and has written features about pets and the importance of animal rescue for media outlets such as Best Friends Animal Society and Cat Fancy. Julie is a television addict, an avid walker, and an obsessive fan of the Ohio State Buckeyes. Although a lifelong Ohio resident, Julie nevertheless has an ongoing love affair with the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.
Julie’s novels include the paranormal thrillers Polar Night and Polar Day as well as the historical love story The Ghosts of Aquinnah. She is also the author of the horror novella The Turnagain Arm, and her horror short story “Cardinal Sin” is part of the Mayhem in the Air anthology. Julie is a history buff who loves incorporating history into her stories, which she calls “mysteries untethered by time.” For more about Julie and her books, go to julieflanders.net
Stephen Michael Flaum
Steve Flaum lived the first 74 of his 78+ years around Dayton, Ohio, where he was born. He grew up in what was once a sleepy little farm town of Centerville, Ohio; he remembers that the town was so quiet on a summer Saturday night he could sit in the middle of the only two-lane highway, gaze up at a million stars, and never a car would come by.
He almost died of a kidney infection in the fifth grade, and had to be home tutored by his teacher, Miss Shirley Battles, who gave him a book about Abraham Lincoln, and awakened in her student what would become a lifelong love of history. Steve had no idea where that love would take him in life.
He survived being the worst baseball player on every little league team he played on, and graduated from Centerville High School in 1964. He was in the first graduating class of Wright State University, and then began a career of teaching middle school social studies that lasted 31 years. He retired in 1999 from a profession that earned him many honors of recognition, but none higher than the praise given by his students for his dedication, imagination, caring and passion for his craft.
In 1999, Steve began to research his German and Irish family histories, and 24 years later, he became an author, publishing his first book, “A Story Never Shared: The Last Prussian”. It is a book of history, born of a mystery, once lived in Prussia and Cleveland, Ohio during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Steve is now as retired as a busy person can be, living on 42 acres of woods in Hillsboro, Ohio, with his wife, 4 cats and more than a few raccoons and squirrels. One of those raccoons became the inspiration for a children’s book he hopes to publish very soon. Life goes on.