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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Dior J. Stephens
Dior J. Stephens is a proud Midwestern pisces poet. He is the author of the chapbooks SCREAMS & lavender, 001, and CANNON!, all with Ghost City Press. Dior holds an MFA in Creative Writing from California College of the Arts and is currently a doctoral candidate in the Philosophy program at the University of Cincinnati. CRUEL/CRUEL is his debut collection of poetry.
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.
Deanne Stillman
Deanne Stillman is a widely published, critically acclaimed writer. Her books include Blood Brothers (Ohioana Book Award winner, starred review, Kirkus; “best of the West 2018,” True West Magazine); Desert Reckoning (winner of the Spur and LA Press Club Awards for nonfiction, an amazon editors pick, based on a Rolling Stone piece), and Mustang, a Los Angeles Times “best book of the year.” 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 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.
https://www.newsweek.com/blood-brothers-sitting-bull-buffalo-bill-book-book-excerpt-674632
https://themillions.com/2017/11/reconciling-americas-original-sin-the-millions-interviews-deanne-stillman.html
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/locked-out-of-time-a-conversation-with-deanne-stillman/
Alison Stine
ALISON STINE is the author of the novel Trashlands (MIRA / HarperCollins), which The LA Times called a “ballad to love in a time of darkness,” longlisted for the 2022 Reading the West Book Award, a current finalist for the Ohioana Book Award and currently longlisted for the 2022 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.…
Read MoreALISON STINE is the author of the novel Trashlands (MIRA / HarperCollins), which The LA Times called a “ballad to love in a time of darkness,” longlisted for the 2022 Reading the West Book Award, a current finalist for the Ohioana Book Award and currently longlisted for the 2022 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Her first novel Road Out of Winter won the 2021 Philip K. Dick Award.
She is also the author of three poetry collections published on university presses and a novella. Her next novel Dust will be published by Wednesday Books (Macmillan) in fall 2023.
Recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Ohio Arts Council grant, a Sustainable Arts grant, and a reporting grant from National Geographic, she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a Ruth Lilly Fellow from the Poetry Foundation, and received the Studs Terkel Award for Media and Journalism.
Partially deaf, she is the Staff Culture Writer at Salon, and has also reported for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, 100 Days in Appalachia, and more. After living in rural Ohio for many years, where she was raised and where her son was born, she now lives in Colorado with her family. Check out her website: https://www.alisonstine.com/
Mary Stockwell
Dr. Mary Stockwell is a writer who has lived most of her life in the twelve-mile-by-twelve-mile square reserve carved out by Anthony Wayne near the mouth of the Maumee River in the Treaty of Greeneville. Her latest book Unlikely General: “Mad” Anthony Wayne and the Battle for America (Yale University Press, 2018) brings to life the man behind the myth of Mad Anthony. She got her love of history from her father who was proud of his Irish heritage and who took his children along remnants of 19th century canals in Ohio reminding them that their ancestors came to this country to build them and for the freedom and opportunity that America promised. She got her love of storytelling from her mother who was an actress, director, acting teacher, and prize-winning poet.
After completing her Ph.D. in American history at the University of Toledo, where she was the last student of W. Eugene Hollon, the noted historian of the American West, she worked as a writer at Detroit Edison’s Fermi II Nuclear Power Plant. The experience taught her how people make decisions in the real world. These insights helped her become a better writer.
In 1996, she was hired as the American History Professor at Lourdes University, and in 2001, she became the Chair of its Department of History, Political Science, and Geography. She won the Faculty Excellence Award for her superior teaching three times at Lourdes University and was nominated by her institution for national teaching awards. She said goodbye to her teaching and administrative career in 2012 to become a full-time writer and to accept the Earhart Foundation Fellowship at the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan. She was also awarded a Gilder-Lehrman Fellowship to study at the New York Public Library.
Mary Stockwell is the author of The Other Trail of Tears: The Removal of the Ohio Indians (Westholme, 2015), a finalist for the Ohio Library Association’s Best Book on Ohio Award in 2016. She has also written history books used by young people throughout the United States including The Ohio Adventure, A Journey through Maine, and Massachusetts, Our Home, the 2005 winner of the Golden Lamp Award from the Association of Educational Publishers for Best Book, as well as The American Story: Perspectives and Encounters to 1865, a college level textbook used by students around the world. She is the author of Woodrow Wilson: The Last Romantic in the First Men: America’s Presidents Series, which has been nominated for the 2018 Dartmouth Medal. Her essays on George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt have appeared in major scholarly studies of these presidents. She has written for the website of George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate. Stockwell’s Interrupted Odyssey: Ulysses S. Grant and the American Indians, the first complete study of Grant’s Indian policy, was published by the Southern Illinois University Press in September 2018.