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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James Alan Riley
James Alan Riley is an American poet whose work has appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowships from the Kentucky Arts Council, and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council. Riley received his Ph.D. from Ohio University. He is a Professor of English at the University of Pikeville in Pikeville, KY.
Sandra Rivers-Gill
A Native Ohioan, Sandra Rivers-Gill is a poet, teaching artist, and performer. Her poetry has garnered numerous awards, and has been featured in journals and anthologies. She is a member of the Ohio Poetry Association and has participated in events such as Lit Youngstown Festival, Poetry Out Loud, Spoken & Heard, and the Toledo Arts Commission. She is editor of Dopeless Hope Fiends, a limited-addition anthology of poems penned by women recovering from substance and alcohol abuse published by The Radio Room Press (2018). As We Cover Ourselves With Light is her debut chapbook published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions (2023).
Edward J. Roach
Edward J. Roach is the site historian and resource manager at Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park in Ohio, where he manages the park’s library and museum collections and also assists partners in conserving and interpreting the artifacts and stories that they preserve. He has B.A. and M.A. degrees in history from Moravian College (Bethlehem, Pa.) and Indiana University of Pennsylvania (Indiana, Pa.), respectively, and taught English with the Peace Corps in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, before gaining employment with the National Park Service in 2001.…
Read MoreEdward J. Roach is the site historian and resource manager at Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park in Ohio, where he manages the park’s library and museum collections and also assists partners in conserving and interpreting the artifacts and stories that they preserve. He has B.A. and M.A. degrees in history from Moravian College (Bethlehem, Pa.) and Indiana University of Pennsylvania (Indiana, Pa.), respectively, and taught English with the Peace Corps in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, before gaining employment with the National Park Service in 2001. He is an active member of the Organization of American Historians, the Society for the History of Technology, and the National Council on Public History. Roach is from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; he and his wife live in Centerville, Ohio.
Debra Robinson
Debra Robinson is an author, psychic and professional musician/songwriter. She speaks on the ancient art and science of palmistry, psychic abilities, and has thriving careers in music performance and publishing. Most recently a song from her catalogue was placed in the Matthew McConaughey film trailer, Killer Joe. Debra’s first book A Haunted Life: The True Ghost Story of a Reluctant Psychic, was released by Llewellyn Worldwide in 2013. Her latest book with Llewellyn, The Dead are Watching: More Ghost Stories from a Reluctant Psychic, is both heartwarming and terrifying. It includes stories of loved ones’ returns as well as true life hauntings. She recently signed a three-book deal with Permuted Press for her paranormal fiction. The Haunting of Black Tower Mansion will be released April 2015. Sarah’s Shadows will be re-released May 2015 and the sequel to Sarah’s Shadows June 2015. Debra lives in New Philadelphia Ohio, in a haunted house.
David Rohr
Born and raised in Ohio, David Rohr spent his working career in the state until the
age of 29. Even though he’s been a resident of other states since then—New York and
Tennessee—David remains a frequent Buckeye State visitor, as most of his immediate
family still resides there. He is an enthusiastic fan of Ohio State Buckeye football as
well as of many other Ohio college and professional sports teams.
His advertising and marketing communications career includes writing, creative
direction, and management for a number of advertising agencies and
communications firms. He has served clients ranging from those on the Fortune 500
to smaller companies and human services organizations. This career, as David likes to
point out, enabled him to write everything from rap songs about pastries to fulllength
books promoting multi-million dollar printing equipment. He is also an
entrepreneur, teacher, and father of three.
David is a proud graduate of Ottawa Hills High School (Toledo). In addition, he has a
B.S. in Journalism from Bowling Green State University, an M.S. in Management and
an M.A. in Liberal Studies, both from Nazareth College of Rochester plus a graduate
certificate from Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Josh Rolnick
Josh Rolnick’s short story collection, “Pulp and Paper,” won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, selected by Yiyun Li. His short stories have won the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize and the Florida Review Editor’s Choice Prize. They have been published in Harvard Review, Western Humanities Review, Bellingham Review, and Gulf Coast, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New American Voices. Josh holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and an MA in Writing from The Johns Hopkins University. He formerly served as fiction editor at the Iowa Review as well as Unstuck: A literary annual. Josh has taught writing at the University of Iowa and Chautauqua Institution in Western New York, and has appeared as a guest lecturer at Johns Hopkins and Akron University. He currently serves as an advisor for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and teaches fiction writing at the Sackett Street Writer’s Workshop.
Photo: Nancy Williams
Robert Roman
Robert J. Roman was born in Connecticut and raised in Ohio. He attended The Ohio
State University where he double-majored in psychology and American history/American
studies. There he saw tens of thousands of students, who otherwise seemed to
agree on almost nothing, be of one mind about their football team. He holds a master’s
degree in psychology from New York University and currently lives in New York City.
Mar Romasco-Moore
Mar Romasco-Moore is the author of the novels Deadstream (forthcoming 2025), I Am the Ghost in Your House, Krazyland, and Some Kind of Animal, as well as the multimedia flash fiction collection Ghostographs. They teach writing at Columbus College of Art and Design. Learn more at: https://marromascomoore.com/
Stepfanie Romine
Born and raised in Ohio, Stepfanie Romine is a cookbook author, health coach and yoga teacher who has lived and cooked on three continents. After spending a year teaching English in South Korea and later discovering Ashtanga yoga, she turned her passion for health and wellness into a career. For several years, Stepfanie was the editorial director for the online healthy living community SparkPeople.com, then she worked as a copywriter and recipe developer for an herbal products manufacturer in western North Carolina. She now writes about natural health and wellness and teaches cooking classes in the Asheville area.
Stepfanie has been a registered yoga teacher since 2009, and she is also a certified health coach through the American Council on Exercise. She has completed courses in herbal supplements, ayurveda and holistic and integrative nutrition.
Cooking helped Stepfanie lose 40 pounds over a decade ago — and she’s kept it off ever since. Today she cooks healthy, seasonal, plant-based meals to fuel her running and her husband’s long-distance road cycling. Stepfanie is the co-author of The No Meat Athlete Cookbook, The SparkPeople Cookbook and The Spark Solution.
Find her at The Flexible Kitchen, or connect with her via Instagram, Twitter or Facebook.
A.J. Romriell
AJ Romriell is a Pushcart-nominated writer and educator, originally from Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the author of Wolf Act (2025), a memoir that earned first prize in the Utah Original Writing Competition and was a finalist for the Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Contest. His essays, stories, and poems have been featured in The Missouri Review, Black Warrior Review, Brevity, New Delta Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Utah, he is now a Presidential Fellow at The Ohio State University where he writes about queerness, fairy tales, video games, apocalypse narratives, HIV, and more. When not writing, he can be found making a mean latte or playing hide and seek with his cat.