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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Norman Finkelstein
Norman Finkelstein is the author of eleven books of poetry and five books of literary criticism. A widely published scholar in the fields of modern American poetry and Jewish literature, he was born in New York City in 1954, and lives in Cincinnati, where he is Professor of English at Xavier University. His most recent books of poetry are The Ratio of Reason to Magic: New & Selected Poems (Dos Madres, 2016) and From the Files of the Immanent Foundation (Dos Madres, 2018). A book of critical essays, Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry & the Jewish Literary Imagination, is forthcoming from Hebrew Union College Press in 2019.
Michelle Fishpaw
Michelle Fishpaw began writing Claire’s Voice – her first book – more than a decade ago following the injury of her, daughter, Claire, who was shaken by a babysitter in her home town of Columbus, Ohio. After being in the teaching field for 20 years, she chose to pursue another career and is currently a licensed massage therapist. Michelle remains a passionate advocate in creating hope and helping others, and currently lives in Narragansett, Rhode Island. She enjoys walks on the beach, collecting sea glass and shells along the nearby coastline. For more information visit: michellefishpaw.com
Pia Fitzgerald
David S. FitzSimmons
David FitzSimmons is an award-winning free-lance photographer and writer. His nonfiction picture books have won twelve national book awards, including an IBPA Best Picture Book award in 2016. His Curious Critters children’s picture books have sold over 100,000 copies. A life-long educator, David has taught on all grade levels and now frequently visits schools to talk about connecting children and nature.
Charlene Fix
Charlene Fix, an Emeritus English Professor at Columbus College of Art and Design, taught the writing of essays and poems, American Literature, Film and Literature, and special topics courses she created like The Artist as Protagonist, Word and Image, and Road Trip! The Picaresque Novel (and Some Films). She chaired the English and Philosophy Department for about ten years.
A member of The House of Toast Poets, a workshop and performance group, she has received poetry fellowships from both the Ohio and the Greater Columbus Arts Councils, and has published poems in various literary magazines, among them Poetry, Literary Imagination, Hotel Amerika, The Journal, The Manhattan Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Rattle, and The Cincinnati Review. She won the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award and the Louis Hammer Memorial Award from The Poetry Society of America and was a finalist once for The Lyric Poem Award. Her poem, “They Thought Our Sins Were Bread,” (in Jewgirl) was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by The Manhattan Review. Charlene is the author of two chapbooks: Mischief (Pudding House 2003) & Charlene Fix: Greatest Hits (Kattywompus 2012), and four full length collections: Flowering Bruno, a dog-besotted collection of poems with illustrations by Susan Josephson (XOXOX Press 2006 and finalist for the 2007 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry), Frankenstein’s Flowers, poems inspired by myth, books, and films (CW Books 2014), Taking a Walk in My Animal Hat, poems inhabited by the four-legged and winged nations (Bottom Dog Press, 2018), and Jewgirl (shortlisted for the Sexton Prize from Eyewear Publishing; Broadstone Books 2023), as well as a prose/homage, Harpo Marx as Trickster, a critical study of Harpo in the thirteen Marx Brothers’ films (McFarland 2013). She has published two critical essays: “Yes and Yass: Dean Moriarty’s Ecstatic and Lugubrious Affirmations in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road” (Xavier Review, February 2014), and “The Lost Father in Death of a Salesman” (Michigan Quarterly Review, summer 2008). Her poem, “What Dreams May Be” appears on the Academy of American Poets website.
Charlene is an activist for peace and social justice. Mother of three, grandmother of two, she co-coordinates Hospital Poets at the Ohio State University and Nationwide Children’s Hospitals.
Savanna Flakes
Savanna Flakes is an award-winning speaker and international educational consultant whose mission is to ignite fires within others to create sustainable change on topics such as inclusion and equity, social emotional learning, and shaking up special education. Savanna is the founder and CEO of Inclusion For a Better Future and partners with school communities around the world to share effective instructional practices for students with exceptionalities. As a champion for inclusive education, Savanna has received numerous honors and awards for her work on behalf of students with disabilities, such as a TEDxTalk; her book for teachers, Shaking Up Special Education: Instructional Moves to Increase Achievement, and many education articles. Savanna is a changemaker, and she is working to positively impact the lives of teachers, children, and families. With her pen and paper, she hopes to continue to bring families and school communities together. As a united team, we can ensure every child shines, and that no dream is impossible!
Erin Flanagan
Erin Flanagan is the author of two short-story collections and three novels including Deer Season, winner of the 2022 Edgar for Best First Novel, and the most recent Come with Me. She is an English professor at Wright State University and a regular book reviewer for Publishers Weekly. For more information about her and her writing, please visit http://www.erinflanagan.net or say hello on Twitter and Instagram at @erinlflanagan.
Julie Flanders
Julie Flanders is an academic librarian by day and a writer the rest of the time. She is also an animal lover and has written features about pets and the importance of animal rescue for media outlets such as Best Friends Animal Society and Cat Fancy. Julie is a television addict, an avid walker, and an obsessive fan of the Ohio State Buckeyes. Although a lifelong Ohio resident, Julie nevertheless has an ongoing love affair with the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.
Julie’s novels include the paranormal thrillers Polar Night and Polar Day as well as the historical love story The Ghosts of Aquinnah. She is also the author of the horror novella The Turnagain Arm, and her horror short story “Cardinal Sin” is part of the Mayhem in the Air anthology. Julie is a history buff who loves incorporating history into her stories, which she calls “mysteries untethered by time.” For more about Julie and her books, go to julieflanders.net
Stephen Michael Flaum
Steve Flaum lived the first 74 of his 78+ years around Dayton, Ohio, where he was born. He grew up in what was once a sleepy little farm town of Centerville, Ohio; he remembers that the town was so quiet on a summer Saturday night he could sit in the middle of the only two-lane highway, gaze up at a million stars, and never a car would come by.
He almost died of a kidney infection in the fifth grade, and had to be home tutored by his teacher, Miss Shirley Battles, who gave him a book about Abraham Lincoln, and awakened in her student what would become a lifelong love of history. Steve had no idea where that love would take him in life.
He survived being the worst baseball player on every little league team he played on, and graduated from Centerville High School in 1964. He was in the first graduating class of Wright State University, and then began a career of teaching middle school social studies that lasted 31 years. He retired in 1999 from a profession that earned him many honors of recognition, but none higher than the praise given by his students for his dedication, imagination, caring and passion for his craft.
In 1999, Steve began to research his German and Irish family histories, and 24 years later, he became an author, publishing his first book, “A Story Never Shared: The Last Prussian”. It is a book of history, born of a mystery, once lived in Prussia and Cleveland, Ohio during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Steve is now as retired as a busy person can be, living on 42 acres of woods in Hillsboro, Ohio, with his wife, 4 cats and more than a few raccoons and squirrels. One of those raccoons became the inspiration for a children’s book he hopes to publish very soon. Life goes on.
Deborah Fleming
Deborah Fleming’s research interests include Anglo-Irish literature, environmental studies, and modern poetry, especially the work of William Butler Yeats, Robinson Jeffers, and Eamon Grennan. After earning her PhD in English at Ohio State University in 1985, she published “A man who does not exist”: The Irish Peasant in the Work of W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge with the University of Michigan Press and articles on Yeats, Jeffers, Grennan, Orwell, and Aldo Leopold. In 2015 she published Towers of Myth and Stone: Yeats’s Influence on Robinson Jeffers with the University of South Carolina Press. She has edited two collections of essays published by Locust Hill Press, Learning the Trade: W. B. Yeats and Contemporary Poetry and W. B. Yeats and Postcolonialism. She has published two collections of poetry, Morning, Winter Solstice (Vineyard, 2012) and Into a New Country (Cherry Grove, 2016) and two chapbooks by Finishing Line Press, Migrations (2005) and Source of the River (2018). In 2014 she published a novel, Without Leave (Black Mountain Press), winner of the Asheville Award, and in 2019 a collection of environmental essays, Resurrection of the Wild: Meditations on Ohio’s Natural Landscape with Kent State University Press. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Council of Learned Societies. Three of her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Currently she is Editor and Director of the Ashland Poetry Press.