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.
- You are searching within category(ies): Poetry
Dave Lucas
As a native Ohioan, born in Cleveland, Dave Lucas earned his B.A. (English) at John Carroll University, M.F.A. (Creative Writing) at the University of Virginia, and M.A. and Ph.D. (English Language and Literature) at the University of Michigan. He has been an instructor at Case Western Reserve University; the Cleveland Clinic Program in Medical Humanities, Lerner College of Medicine; the John Carroll Young Writers Workshop; and Sweet Briar/James Madison University.
His achievements have included: The Reva and David Logan Foundation, For Your Gift grant award; the Cleveland Arts Prize, Emerging Artist in Literature; and a Creative Workforce Fellowship from the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture in Greater Cleveland. His work, Weather, was awarded the 2012 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry. His poems are anthologized in The Bedford Introduction to Literature and Best New Poets 2005, among other publications.
During his time as poet laureate, Lucas said he wants to help Ohioans use poetry to understand and enhance their lives. He is planning a multimedia project involving people from diverse places and backgrounds allowing them to experience a variety of opinions about poetry.
Tammie Lyon
Tammie Lyon is the award-winning author and illustrator of numerous picture books for children. Her first authored picture book, Olive and Snowflake, was released to starred reviews from Kirkus and School Library Journal. Let's Hear It For Almigal was recently awarded the Mom’s Choice Award Gold Medal Winner.…
Read MoreTammie Lyon is the award-winning author and illustrator of numerous picture books for children. Her first authored picture book, Olive and Snowflake, was released to starred reviews from Kirkus and School Library Journal. Let’s Hear It For Almigal was recently awarded the Mom’s Choice Award Gold Medal Winner. My Pup and Bugs In My Hair have both been included on the list of the “Top 100 Best Children’s Books” by the Bank Street College of Education. She is known for her work on the Eloise series for Simon and Schuster as well as her new series, Katie Woo, published by Stonearch Books. Visit her online at http://www.mbartists.com.
Amit Majmudar
AMIT MAJMUDAR is a poet, novelist, essayist, translator, and the former first Poet Laureate of Ohio. He works as a diagnostic and nuclear radiologist and lives in Westerville, Ohio, with his wife and three children. He is the author of seventeen books so far in a variety of categories, with different bodies of work published in the United States and in India.
POETRY: His poetry collections include 0’, 0’ (Northwestern, 2009), shortlisted for the Norma Faber First Book Award; and Heaven and Earth (2011, Storyline Press), which won the Donald Justice Prize. These volumes were followed by Dothead (Knopf, 2016) and What He Did in Solitary (Knopf, 2020). His poems have won the Pushcart Prize and have appeared in the Norton Introduction to Literature, The New Yorker, and numerous Best American Poetry anthologies as well as journals and magazines across the United States, UK, India, and Australia. Majmudar also edited, at Knopf’s invitation, a political poetry anthology entitled Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now. Majmudar’s forthcoming volume, a hybrid of prose, drama, and poetry, is Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2024).
NONFICTION: Majmudar’s essays have appeared in Marginalia at the Los Angeles Review of Books, where he is a contributing editor, as well as The Best American Essays 2018, The New York Times, and the Times of India, among several other publications. His collection of essays, focusing on Indian religious philosophy, history, and mythology, is Black Avatar and Other Essays (Acre Books, 2023). Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023) is a memoir, in prose and verse, about his son’s struggle with congenital heart disease.
FICTION: Majmudar’s work as a novelist includes two works of historical fiction centered around the 1947 Partition of India, Partitions (Holt/Metropolitan, 2011) and The Map and the Scissors (HarperCollins India, 2022). His first children’s book also focuses on Indian history and is entitled Heroes the Colour of Dust (Puffin India, 2022). Majmudar has also penned a tragicomic, magical realist fable of Indian soldiers during World War I, Soar (Penguin India, 2020). The Abundance (Holt/Metropolitan, 2013), by contrast, is a work of contemporary realism exploring Indian-American life. Majmudar’s long-form fiction has garnered rave reviews from NPR’s All Things Considered, The Wall Street Journal, Good Housekeeping, and The Economist, as well as starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist; his short fiction won a 2017 O. Henry Prize.
MYTHOLOGY: Majmudar’s work in Hindu mythology includes a polyphonic Ramayana retelling, Sitayana (Penguin India, 2019), and The Book of Vows (Penguin India, 2023), the first volume in a trilogy that retells the ancient epic poem, Mahabharata. The forthcoming volumes are entitled The Book of Discoveries and The Book of Killings. He has also composed a forthcoming original mythological story cycle called The Later Adventures of Hanuman (Penguin India, 2024).
TRANSLATION: His work as a translator includes Godsong: A Verse Translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, with Commentary (Knopf, 2018), available both in the United States and India.
Charles Malone
Charles Malone grew up in rural Northeastern Ohio, headed west to the Rockies, came back to the Great Lakes, and has loved all of it. His first full-length collection, Working Hypothesis, is out with Finishing Line Press in 2020. His chapbook “Questions About Circulation” was published by Driftwood Press as part of the Adrift Chapbook Series. He edited the collection “A Poetic Inventory of Rocky Mountain National Park” with Wolverine Farm Publishing and has work recently published or forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, The Best of Boneshaker: A Bicycling Almanac, The Sugar House Review, The Dunes Review, and Saltfront. Charles now works at the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University coordinating community outreach programs.
David Matthews
A Discovery of World-Acclaimed Poetess Nikki Giovanni. In 1972 and since then has made a lasting impression in the world of poetry. As a native of Dayton, Ohio, often Matthews has been referred to, as the next Paul Laurence Dunbar. Matthews graduated from Urbana University Urbana, Ohio with a B.S. in Behavioral Science B.A. in Sociology and a minor in Theatre and Creative Writing in 1974. His books are in libraries across the country. If you take a Poetry 101 course from the University of Northern Colorado in Greenly, Colorado or Tennessee State University in Nashville, Tennessee, you will have to study the works of David Matthews.
Over the years Matthews has performed in over 21 different States, at over 300 College and University campuses and in Europe. Matthews has been awarded, the
‘National Poem of the Year Award’ from the Los Angeles, American Poet Society twice. First in 1973 for the poem “America Ain’t You Got No Shame”. Then again in 1976 for the poem “They Say Bicentennial But We Are The Ones That Over Came, Can You Get To That?” He is the only poet to receive the award twice.
Matthews was also awarded the ‘Outstanding Young Man of The Year Award’ in Montgomery, Alabama in 1980. He received the ‘Literary Consciousness Award’ from Northern Kentucky University in 1981. The’ Key to the city of Dayton’ 1982 and the ‘WROU U92 Black Achievement Award’ in 2001. In addition, he received ‘Dayton’s Top 10 African American Award’ in 2006.
Not a stranger to the stage, Matthews has performed with a variety of artist, including Gil Scott-Heron, the group WAR and Grover Washington Jr. He performed for years with his, poetry production company called “An Evening On Broadway with Author, Poet/Musician david Matthews.” He is the author of three books of poetry and a CD: the feel of FEELING 1976, Time Brings About A Change 1980, MESSAGE 1984 and CD – A Poetic Awakening 2002. Barnes & Nobles in 2010 quoted the value of Matthews first published poetry book, the feel of FEELING 1976 an autographed copy at $202. The manuscript was published by Vantage Press in New York City. Matthews is amazingly talented he also plays 19 different African and Latin Percussion instruments. He continues to reach audiences throughout the country and makes an impact in the community through his art.
John Matthias
John Matthias was born in 1941 in Columbus, Ohio. For many years he taught at the University of Notre Dame and continues to serve as poetry editor of Notre Dame Review. He has been a Visiting Fellow in poetry at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and lived for much of the 70s and 80s in East Anglia. His books of verse include Turns, Crossing, Northern Summer, A Gathering of Ways, Swimming at Midnight, Beltane at Aphelion, Pages, Working Progress, Working Title, New Selected Poems and Kedging. He has also published translations from the Swedish, editions of David Jones’ work, and a volume of literary criticism, Reading Old Friends. In 1998 Robert Archambeau edited Word Play Place, a selection of essays on Matthias’s work. Another book of essays on his poetry appeared in 2011 in the Salt Companion series, edited by Joe Francis Doerr. Since 2010, Shearsman has republished all of his poetry in the volumes Trigons (2010), Collected Shorter Poems Vol. 2 (2011), Collected Longer Poems (2012) and Collected Shorter Poems Vol. 1 (2013). In 2011 Shearsman also pubished his essay collection, Who was Cousin Alice?
Wendy McVicker
Wendy McVicker, 2020-2022 poet laureate of Athens, Ohio, is a longtime Ohio Arts Council teaching artist. Her previous books include the dancer’s notes (Finishing Line Press, 2015), the self-published collaboration with visual artist John McVicker Sliced Dark (2018), Zero, a Door (The Orchard Street Press, 2021), and Stronger When We Touch, a collaboration with poet Cathy Cultice Lentes (The Orchard Street Press, 2023). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies over the years, including Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Sheila-Na-Gig Online, Gyroscope Review, and Northern Appalachia Review. She loves collaborating with artists in many mediums and performs with instrumentalist Emily Prince under the name “another language altogether” whenever she gets the chance. Her children having grown and flown, she lives surrounded by the green hills of southeastern Ohio with her husband and a Hemingway cat named Dora.
Wendy McVicker
Wendy McVicker, 2020-2022 poet laureate of Athens, Ohio, is a longtime Ohio Arts Council teaching artist. Her previous books include the dancer’s notes (Finishing Line Press, 2015), the self-published collaboration with visual artist John McVicker Sliced Dark (2018), Zero, a Door (The Orchard Street Press, 2021), and Stronger When We Touch, a collaboration with poet Cathy Cultice Lentes (The Orchard Street Press, 2023). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies over the years, including Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Sheila-Na-Gig online, Gyroscope Review, and Northern Appalachia Review. She loves collaborating with artists in many mediums and performs with instrumentalist Emily Prince under the name “another language altogether” whenever she gets the chance. Her children having grown and flown, she lives surrounded by the green hills of southeastern Ohio with her husband and a Hemingway cat named Dora.
Philip Metres
Philip Metres is the author of ten books, including Shrapnel Maps (2020), The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (2018), Pictures at an Exhibition (2016), Sand Opera (2015), I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (2015), and others. His work has garnered the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lannan Fellowship, two NEAs, six Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Hunt Prize, the Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, the Watson Fellowship, the Lyric Poetry Prize, Creative Workforce Fellowship, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University
Judith Moffett
Judith Moffett was born in Louisville in 1942 and grew up in Cincinnati. She is an English professor, a poet, a Swedish translator, and the author of twelve books in six genres. These include three volumes of poetry, two of Swedish poetry in formal translation, four science-fiction novels plus a collection of stories, a volume of creative nonfiction, and a critical study of James Merrill’s poetry. She has also written an unpublished memoir of her long friendship with Merrill. Her work in poetry, translation, and science fiction has earned numerous awards and award nominations, including an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry, an NEH Translation Grant, the Swedish Academy’s Tolkningspris, and in science fiction the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the Theodore Sturgeon Award for the year’s best short story. Two of her novels were New York Times Notable Books.
Moffett earned a doctorate in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania, with a thesis on Stephen Vincent Benét’s narrative poetry, directed by Daniel Hoffman. She taught American literature and creative writing at several colleges and universities, including the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of Kentucky, and for fifteen years the University of Pennsylvania. She has lived for extended periods in England (Cambridge and London) and Sweden (Lund and Stockholm), as well as around the US, living/teaching/writing in Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Colorado, Wisconsin, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Utah. In 1983 she married Medievalist Edward B. Irving, Jr., her colleague at Penn. Widowed in 1998, Judy now divides her year between Oxford OH and her hundred-acre recovering farm near Lawrenceburg KY, sharing both homes with her standard poodles, Corbie and Lexi.
For a complete list of Judy’s published work, visit her Wikipedia entry: wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Moffett