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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Tom Betti
Tom Betti serves on the board of Columbus Landmarks Foundation and is also chair of the Education Committee charged with leading the organization’s educational tours and extensive programming. He also founded and leads the Historic Preservation Committee of the Athletic Club of Columbus, celebrating, organizing, and documenting the club’s one-hundred-year history.
Read MoreTom Betti serves on the board of Columbus Landmarks Foundation and is also chair of the Education Committee charged with leading the organization’s educational tours and extensive programming. He also founded and leads the Historic Preservation Committee of the Athletic Club of Columbus, celebrating, organizing, and documenting the club’s one-hundred-year history.
Matt Betts
Matt Betts is an author and former radio personality. His work includes such science fiction novels as the critically recognized adventure Odd Men Out and its sequel Red Gear Nine, the urban fantasy Indelible Ink, the giant monster vs. giant robot book The Shadow Beneath the Waves, and the cryptid horror tale White Anvil: Sasquatch Onslaught. He is also an accomplished speculative poet, and lives in Columbus with his wife and children.
Laura Bickle
Laura Bickle grew up in rural Ohio, reading entirely too many comic books out loud to her favorite Wonder Woman doll. After graduating with an MA in Sociology – Criminology from Ohio State University and an MLIS in Library Science from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, she patrolled the stacks at the public library and worked with data systems in criminal justice. She now dreams up stories about the monsters under the stairs, also writing contemporary fantasy novels under the name Alayna Williams. Her work has been included in the ALA’s Amelia Bloomer Project 2013 reading list and the State Library of Ohio’s Choose to Read Ohio reading list for 2015-2016. Her newest project is the Wildlands contemporary fantasy series for Harper Voyager. The latest updates on her work are available at http://www.laurabickle.com/
George Bilgere
George Bilgere’s eighth collection of poetry is Central Air (2022). He has received the Midland Authors Prize, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the May Swenson Poetry Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Witter Bynner Fellowship through the Library of Congress, the Devins Award, the University of Akron Poetry Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, the Ohioana Poetry Prize, the Autumn House Poetry Prize, the Cleveland Arts Prize, a Cleveland Creative Workforce grant, and four Individual Excellence grants from the Ohio Arts Council. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, Southern Review, Iowa Review, Georgia Review, Sewanee Review, New Ohio Review, Hopkins Quarterly, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. In 2021 he was the winner of the New Ohio Review’s Editor’s Choice Poetry Prize. Bilgere has given poetry readings at the Library of Congress, the 92nd Street Y in New York, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC., the Chautauqua Institute, the Philip Larkin Library in Hull, England, and colleges, bookstores and libraries around the country. NPR listeners know him from his appearances on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion and more than fifty appearances on the National Public Radio broadcast, The Writer’s Almanac. Here in Cleveland, Bilgere, a recipient of John Carroll’s Distinguished Faculty Award, hosts a popular spoken word radio show on WJCU called Wordplay. Bilgere lives in Cleveland Heights with his marvelous wife and two very fine little boys. They spend their summers in Berlin, Germany, and can tell you a great deal about beer gardens.
Jenn Bishop
Jenn Bishop is the author of five novels for young readers, including the Parents’ Choice Gold Award winner Things You Can’t Say and 2023 & 2024 Choose to Read Ohio title Where We Used to Roam. Her books have been named Junior Library Guild selections and Bank Street College of Education best books and have been finalists for state book awards. She currently calls Cincinnati, Ohio, home. What team do you think she roots for?
Mansel G. Blackford
Mansel G. Blackford is Professor Emeritus at The Ohio State University.
Jonathan Blunk
JONATHAN BLUNK is the author of James Wright: A Life in Poetry, the authorized biography of the poet published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in October 2017. Blunk assisted with editing Wright’s selected letters, A Wild Perfection (FSG, 2005). His essay on the poetry of Jean Valentine is included in This-World Company, the collection of critical writing devoted to her work published by the University of Michigan Press in 2012.…
Read MoreJONATHAN BLUNK is the author of James Wright: A Life in Poetry, the authorized biography of the poet published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in October 2017. Blunk assisted with editing Wright’s selected letters, A Wild Perfection (FSG, 2005). His essay on the poetry of Jean Valentine is included in This-World Company, the collection of critical writing devoted to her work published by the University of Michigan Press in 2012.
At the time of James Wright’s death in 1980, Blunk had already begun writing a thesis at Cornell University on the poet’s translations from the Spanish. In 1990, to honor the publication of Wright’s Complete Poems, Above the River (FSG and Wesleyan University Press), Blunk began recording interviews for an audio documentary on the poet’s life and work. His research for James Wright: A Life in Poetry draws on more than 300 hours of interviews and archival source recordings that capture both Wright and the memories and reflections of his friends, family members, students, and colleagues, including some of the most prominent writers in the country.