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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Rae Carson
Rae Carson is a young adult novelist. Her debut novel, The Girl of Fire and Thorns received the first official Ohioana Young Adult Book Award. Publishers Weekly’s starred review of The Girl of Fire and Thorns. It was named one of ALA’s Top Ten Fiction for Young Adults books for 2011 and finalist for the Morris, Cybils, and Andre Norton Awards. The second book in the trilogy, The Crown of Embers, released in September 2012, also received a Publishers Weekly starred review and readers praise. Carson grew up in California and always wanted to be a storyteller. In 2004, Rae joined the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror where she found her calling, made many friends, and met her future husband. She now lives in Arizona with her husband, noted author C.C. Finlay, and step-sons. Visit Rae’s website at http://www.raecarson.com/.
Mary Kay Carson
Mary Kay Carson is the author of more than fifty nonfiction books for young people about wildlife, space, weather, nature, and history. After studying biology in college, and a stint in the Peace Corps, she began her writing career working on the classroom magazine SuperScience at Scholastic in NYC. Her books have received more than a dozen starred reviews, as well as multiple awards, including the 2019 AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books and the 2023 Giverny Award for Best Children’s Science Picture Book. She also gives presentations at schools and libraries. http://www.marykaycarson.com.
Mary Ellis
Mary Ellis is a former schoolteacher turned USA Today bestselling author who’s written twenty-six novels including Amish fiction, historical romance, and suspense. Her first mystery, Midnight on the Mississippi, was a finalist for the RT Magazine’s Reviewer’s Choice Award and a finalist for the Daphne du Maurier Award. Her latest series is the Bourbon Tour Mysteries from Severn House. Book two, One Hundred Proof Murder released August 3, 2021. Her latest Amish novella is Missing available on Amazon Kindle. She enjoys gardening and bicycling and lives in Ohio with her husband and dog. http://www.maryellis.net or http://www.facebook.com/Mary.Ellis.Author
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.
Rosemary Laurey
USA Today best-selling author Rosemary Laurey is an ex-pat Brit, retired special education teacher, and grandmother who now lives in Ohio and has a wonderful time writing and letting her imagination run riot. Her hobbies are vacuuming, dusting, and cleaning toilets but regrettably the demands of her writing career leave little time to engage in these pursuits.
Read MoreUSA Today best-selling author Rosemary Laurey is an ex-pat Brit, retired special education teacher, and grandmother who now lives in Ohio and has a wonderful time writing and letting her imagination run riot. Her hobbies are vacuuming, dusting, and cleaning toilets but regrettably the demands of her writing career leave little time to engage in these pursuits.
Mary Ann Winkowski
Mary Ann Winkowski was born in Cleveland, Ohio and has been communicating with earthbound spirits for most of her life. Her earliest memories include talking to spirits of the deceased as if they were living people and helping these entities cross over into the White Light.
Over the course of work as a paranormal investigator, Mary Ann’s reputation has spread. She is a consultant to the CBS hit television show Ghost Whisperer, has appeared on numerous TV and radio news programs, and spoken at countless lectures. What once she between raising two daughters, foster parenting, and pet grooming has now become a fulltime vocation.
Still living and working primarily in the Cleveland area, Mary Ann has offered her abilities to those in need as far away as New Mexico, St. Lucia, and Scotland. In When Ghosts Speak: Understanding the World of Earthbound Spirits (Grand Central Publishing, October 2007) Mary Ann shares a lifetime’s worth of information about the spirit world and reveals her often surprising interactions with some memorable ghosts.
Mary Ann shows the human side of the paranormal — stories about ghosts told from the perspectives of the ghosts themselves – and teaches us how we can coexist peaceably with the spirits that surround us.
Unlike the sensationalized tales of most ghost lore, When Ghosts Speak presents real stories of troubled people — both the living and the dead — not simply the terror of sinister paranormal manifestations served up by horror novels and Hollywood.
Mary Ann offers lessons on death and the immortality of the spirit that only someone who can actually speak with the deceased could teach. Her abilities have offered solace to countless people, either by reuniting them with loved ones who have died or by removing unwanted spirits and negative energy from homes, businesses or possessions.
Mary Beth Earnheardt
M.B. Earnheardt lives in Youngstown, Ohio, transplanted from her childhood home in Mahaffey, PA, where she grew up on a small farm, surrounded by trees and books. Although she has written a smattering of academic articles and news stories, Switch-A-Wish is her first work of fiction.
When she’s not writing, Earnheardt directs the Anderson Program in Journalism at Youngstown State University, and teaches journalism courses in media law and news reporting. She advises the student newspaper, preparing the next generation of great storytellers. When she’s not teaching, she helps her husband, Dr. Adam C. Earnheardt, raise their four lab experiments (re: kids) in a Petri dish they call “home.”
Earnheardt earned a Ph.D. in communication studies from Kent State University, a M.S. degree in communication, B.S. in communication, and a B.A. in political science from Clarion University of Pennsylvania. Her blog is available at mbearnheardt.com.
Mary Knight
Born and raised in Cincinnati, Mary has always enjoyed the power of a good story, whether it’s been as a children’s librarian, a freelance writer or a writer-in-residence teaching kids how to write. Several years ago, she decided to go back to school to learn how to write a novel. After graduating in 2013 from Spalding University’s MFA program in Writing, Mary completed her middle grade novel, SAVING WONDER, found the agent and editor of her dreams, and is now a published author with Scholastic.
Of all the things she appreciates in life, she especially values loving kindness, a good laugh, the wisdom of young people, and the ability to see the world through another person’s eyes. She believes this last quality, empathy, is the key to not only being a good friend and an awesome person, but being a good writer as well. “I must first step into the minds and hearts of my characters to discover their viewpoints,” she says. “Only then can I find the words to create their world.”
Mary and her husband now live in Lexington, Kentucky with their two cats.
Mary Newman
Mary A. Newman PhD, is the co-author of Cherry, Edible Flowers: A Global History, and Coconut: A Global History (forthcoming in 2022), with her sister, Constance Kirker. Mary has taught at Ohio University, the University of Malta, and Silpakorn University in Thailand, the latter two as a Fulbright Specialist.