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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Phil Stamper
Phil Stamper is the bestselling author of Golden Boys, The Gravity of Us, and other queer books for kids and teens. His stories are packed with queer joy, and his characters are often too ambitious for their own good. Born and raised in a rural village near Dayton, Ohio, he now lives in New York City with his husband and their daughter.
Linda Stanek
Linda Stanek has a passion for teaching, animals, and conservation. Her book, Cheetah Dreams (Arbordale Publishing), released in fall of 2018. Other books include award-winning Once Upon an Elephant (Arbordale Publishing) Night Creepers (Arbordale Publishing), Beco’s Big Year: A Baby Elephant Turns One, (Columbus Zoo and Aquarium), and more. She is the author of Sheeba and the Private Detectives (AZ Corp, 2018) a leveled comic book series that teaches STEM concepts to children in Pakistan. She is a co-author of college textbook Cheetahs: Biodiversity of the World: Conservation from Genes to Landscapes (Academic Press, 2017). In addition to winning the Children’s Choice Book Award’s 3rd-4th grade Book of the Year, Linda’s books have been nominated for a number of other awards, and have been placed on state reading lists. Her book Once Upon an Elephant is a 2019-2020 Choose to Read Ohio title. She is a frequent visitor in schools, and has spoken at zoos and at conferences for museum personnel, librarians, teachers, and writers. In 2019, Linda will work with the Columbus Zoo and The Ohio State University on a scientific study to measure the impact of authors, literature, and ambassador cheetahs in schools.
Sherry Stanforth
Sherry Cook Stanforth, a native of Clermont County, Ohio, grew up in a circle of traditional Appalachian musicians who played dulcimers, guitars, fiddles, banjos and mandolins late into the night. Her singing, flute, tin whistle and harmonica styles were inspired by these old time jammers of her childhood. Over the years, she has performed regionally with Sunset Dawn and Tellico, a three-generation family band named for her father’s Tellico Plains Cherokee ancestry. “Of all the venues I play, the Fraley Festival of Traditional Music at Carter Caves, Kentucky, and my own back porch overlooking the Ohio River bring the most joy.”
As founder and director of Thomas More College’s Creative Writing Vision Program Sherry promotes regional authors, providing high-energy, interactive literary arts events for under-served populations in the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky community. She teaches fiction, poetry, environmental and ethnic literature, and folklore, and often collaborates with TMC students to provide school and public events that blend creative writing with music and the natural world. Currently, she serves as co-editor for Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the literary journal of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative, and as faculty adviser for Words, the campus literary magazine.
Drone String, her first full poetry collection, was nominated for a 2016 Pushcart Prize. Her other writing appears in various journals, anthologies, and NCTE books. She enjoys keeping bees, hiking mountains, and studying native plants. With her husband, David, she raises four children, two trusty hound dogs and a garden.
Sarah Stankorb
Sarah Stankorb is a journalist, essayist, and the author of Disobedient Women. She was born near Youngstown, Ohio, and often found escape in books. She studied world religions and philosophy at Westminster College, a place surrounded by rolling Pennsylvania farm country. A chance to study abroad in Northern Ireland, then Israel further opened her eyes to how faith (and conflict) can shape people’s everyday existence. She earned her master’s degree from University of Chicago’s Divinity School, where she studied ethics and South Asian religion and history. Hundreds of her pieces have been featured in publications, including: VICE, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, and others. Her beat spans religion, politics, gender, and power, but is informed by questions of basic morality. She’s more fun than all this sounds. Sarah lives in Ohio with her husband and two children, and she writes a few times a month about the quirks of American faith at In Polite Company via Substack.
Dorri Steinhoff
Dorri Steinhoff grew up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago where she developed a love of nature, art and architecture. She met Joe Kuspan while in graduate school in Cincinnati. Their common interest in art and architecture led to numerous design and renovation projects including two boutique shops in the Short North Art District of Columbus, Ohio and five central Ohio homes. They are currently enjoying watching the seasons change at Glenbrow with their two daughters, Maren and Sofia, while continuing to restore the 1964 Glenbrow tower.
Aileen Stewart
Aileen Stewart is the award winning author of the Fern Valley Series which includes Fern Valley, Return to Fern Valley, and Cooking in Fern Valley, as well as the new Quack and Daisy Picture Book Series, a public speaker, amateur photographer, a blogger, and SCBWI member. In addition, she hosts writing workshops for children in first to sixth grade, offers library and school visits, and speaks at events. She resides in lovely Shelby, Ohio with her beautiful daughter, wonderful husband, and their crazy cats Max, Daisy, and Fluffy. Her motto is “Kids Who Read Can Do Anything!”
Leah Stewart
Leah Stewart is the author of the novels Body of a Girl, The Myth of You and Me, Husband and Wife, The History of Us, and The New Neighbor. The daughter of an Air Force officer and an elementary school teacher, she lived as a child in Virginia, Idaho, England, Kansas, and Virginia again. She went to high school in Clovis, New Mexico (a town featured in her second novel, The Myth of You and Me), college at Vanderbilt University, and graduate school at the University of Michigan. Since then, she has lived in Boston and Chapel Hill and held visiting writer positions at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee; Vanderbilt University; and Murray State University in Kentucky. Now a professor at the University of Cincinnati, she lives in Cincinnati with her husband and two children. In 2010, she was the recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship and in 2014 the recipient of a Sachs Fund Prize, given for contributions to Cincinnati arts and culture. Her fourth novel, The History of Us, which is set in Cincinnati, is on the Choose to Read Ohio list for 2015–16. For more, go to leahstewart.com
R.T. Stewart
In the early 1980s, R. T. Stewart was hired by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Division of Wildlife, as a uniformed state wildlife officer. However, the agency soon discovered Stewart had special skills as an undercover officer. Thus began his 18-year career infiltrating poaching rings–often living with poachers for months or even years on end–and eventually bringing the bad guys to justice. The book, Poachers Were My Prey: Eighteen Years as an Undercover Wildlife Officer, is Stewart’s first-hand account of his various, exciting undercover investigations in Ohio, the Midwest, and beyond. Now retired, R. T. Stewart lives in rural southeast Ohio.
Deanne Stillman
Deanne Stillman is a widely published, critically acclaimed writer. Her latest book is Blood Brothers, praised by Douglas Brinkley as “a landmark achievement in American history,” and recipient of a starred review in Kirkus and named “a best book of the year” by True West and the Millions). She also wrote Desert Reckoning (based on a Rolling Stone piece; it was an amazon editors pick, Spur Award and LA Press Club Award winner, and praised in Newsweek), and Mustang, an LA Times “best book of the year” which helped launch the current conversation about wild horses and burros in America. It’s now available in audio with Anjelica Huston, Frances Fisher, John Densmore, Wendie Malick and Richard Portnow. Additionally, Deanne wrote the cult classic, Twentynine Palms, a Los Angeles Times bestseller that Hunter Thompson called “A strange and brilliant story by an important American writer.” She writes the “Letter from the West” column for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and her work has been published in literary hub, salon, slate, Tin House, the NY Times, LA Times, Orion, Angels Flight – Literary West and elsewhere. Her essays are in many anthologies and her plays have been produced and won prizes around the country. She’s a member of the core faculty at the UC Riverside-Palm Desert MFA Low Residency Creative Writing Program, where she teaches nonfiction.
Deanne Stillman
Deanne Stillman is a widely published, critically acclaimed writer. Her books include Blood Brothers (which received a starred review in Kirkus and appears on several “best of 2017” lists, including two at the millions, and won the 2018 Ohioana Award in nonfiction); Desert Reckoning (winner of the Spur and LA Press Club Awards for nonfiction), and Mustang, a Los Angeles Times “best book of the year.” Mustang is now out in audio with Anjelica Huston, Frances Fisher, Wendie Malick, Richard Portnow, and John Densmore. In addition, she wrote the cult classic, Twentynine Palms, a Los Angeles Times bestseller that Hunter Thompson called “A strange and brilliant story by an important American writer.” She writes the “Letter from the West” column for the Los Angeles Review of Books and is a member of the core faculty at the UC Riverside-Palm Desert MFA Low Residency Creative Writing Program.