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): 2022
Gloria Adams
Gloria G. Adams spent most of her career as a children’s librarian and storyteller. She has been published in books and magazines, along with a picture book, Ah-Choo! with co-author Lana Wayne Koehler, published by Sterling Children’s Books in 2016. She is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI), and she has three non-fiction titles published through Rosen, Enslow, and Greenhaven Press. She is a partner, with author Jean Daigneau, in a manuscript editing company, Two-4-One Kid Critiques, LLC.
Rachele Alpine
One of Rachele Alpine’s first jobs was at a library, but it didn’t last long, because all she did was hide in the third-floor stacks and read. Now she’s a little more careful about when and where she indulges her reading habit. Rachele is a high school English teacher by day, a wife and mother by night, and a writer during any time she can find in between. She lives in Cleveland, Ohio, where she writes books for children, tweens, and young adults. Visit her at rachelealpine.com.
Lisa Amstutz
Lisa Amstutz is the author of more than 150 books for children. She holds degrees in Biology and Environmental Science. A former outdoor educator, she specializes in topics related to nature, sustainability, and agriculture. Lisa lives with her family on a small farm in Ohio. https://www.lisaamstutz.com
Pamela R. Anderson
Pamela R. Anderson is a traveler, blues music lover, yoga practitioner, and former public radio fundraiser who grew up in Ohio’s Steel Valley. Her chapbook Just the Girls: A Kaleidoscope of Butterflies; A Drift of Honeybees was published by The Poetry Box in 2020; Finishing Line Press published her chapbook Widow Maker in 2021, and Kelsay Books/Daffydown Dilly Press published her book of poems for children: The Galloping Garbage Truck. Much of her writing focuses on the Holocaust and her father’s WWII service in the 82nd Airborne; her Holocaust poem “My Brother’s Coat” won an AWP Intro Journals Project award. Anderson’s poetry has appeared in JennyMag.org, Atticus Review, Volney Road Review, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the NEOMFA Program.
Bree Baker
Karina Bartow
Karina Bartow grew up and still lives in Northern Ohio. Though born with Cerebral Palsy, she’s never allowed her disability to define her. Rather, she’s used her experiences to breathe life into characters who have physical limitations, but like her, are determined not to let them stand in the way of the life they want. Her works include Husband in Hiding; Forgetting My Way Back to You; Brother of Interest; Wrong Line, Right Connection; and Accidental Allies. She may only be able to type with one hand, but she writes with her whole heart!
To learn more, visit http://www.KarinaBartow.com.
Tom Batiuk
Tom Batiuk is a graduate of Kent State University. His celebrated Funky Winkerbean comic strip concluded its 50-year run on December 31, 2022. Its spinoff, Crankshaft, is still carried in hundreds of newspapers throughout the United States. Batiuk was a finalist in the editorial cartooning category of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize awards for the singular series of daily comic strips that chronicled the death of longtime character Lisa Moore, which were collected in the Lisa’s Legacy Trilogy. His Funky Winkerbean series and Roses in December were finalists for the 2016 Eisner Awards. https://tombatiuk.com/.
Janet Beard
Born and raised in East Tennessee, Janet Beard moved to New York to study screenwriting at NYU and went on to earn an MFA in creative writing from The New School. Her first novel, ‘Beneath the Pines’, was published in 2008, and her follow-up, ‘The Atomic City Girls’ became an international bestseller 2018. Janet’s latest novel, The Ballad of Laurel Springs, was published in October 2021. Janet has lived and worked in Australia, England, Boston, and Columbus, Ohio, where she is currently raising a daughter and working on a new novel.
Connie Berry
Connie Berry is the author of the Kate Hamilton Mysteries, set in the UK and featuring an American antiques dealer with a gift for solving crimes. Like her protagonist, Connie was raised by antiques dealers who instilled in her a passion for history, fine art, and travel. In 2019 Connie won the IPPY Gold Medal for Mystery and was a finalist for the Agatha Award’s Best Debut. She’s a member of Mystery Writers of America and is on the board of the Guppies and her local Sisters in Crime chapter. Besides reading and writing mysteries, Connie loves history, foreign travel, cute animals, and all things British. She lives in Ohio with her husband and adorable Shih Tzu, Emmie. You can learn more about Connie and her books at her website http://www.connieberry.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.