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.
Brett Harper
Brett Harper is the son of Charley and Edie Harper. He is the executor of the Charley and Edie Harper Estates and the director of the Charley Harper Art Studio. He is also an artist.
Karen Harper
A lifelong Ohioan, Harper taught English before writing full time. She is a NYTimes bestselling author who has won the Mary Higgins Clark Award. She writes both historical novels and contemporary suspense. Karen and her husband make their home in Columbus but love to travel. Her author collection is housed in Rare Books and Manuscripts at The Ohio State University.
Steve Harpster
Steve Harpster lives in Cincinnati Ohio and travels the country teaching kids how to draw, create, and Imagine.
John Harris
John M. Harris grew up in Coshocton, Ohio, and graduated from Wittenberg University in 1976. He worked for more than twenty years as a reporter, photographer, and editor. He is an associate professor of journalism at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.
S.R.D. Harris
Author S.R.D. Harris has always been a reading fanatic! Ever since she was featured in two children’s books as a young child and volunteered at her local library, she has dreamed of becoming a published author. Through hard work and determination, she achieved that dream when she wrote and published her first book, Future Miss President. Harris currently has 8 children’s books published and 2 more in production. She is a graduate of The Ohio State University and a Member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. Her mission is to write and publish high-quality, uplifting, and empowering diverse children’s books that will inspire a love of reading in all children! She has been featured on PBS/WOSU’s Broad & High TV show and in many publications to date. Harris and her husband have 3 daughters, and a rescued puppy named Gracie. Their youngest daughter, Camryn, is her co-author and collaborates on all of her books. Her 4th book, Gracie’s Grace, is in partnership with CHA Animal Shelter, to benefit their mission to help homeless dogs and cats find loving homes. When they are not reading, writing, cooking, or traveling, they enjoy volunteering and giving back. They have currently donated hundreds of their books to students all over Ohio, and Harris enthusiastically volunteers with Reading 365/The American Literacy Corporation. She believes all children can love reading if they connect with the right books for them. You can follow her on her website srdharrisbooks.com and major social media channels @srdharrisbooks. Her books are sold internationally and available in local libraries and bookstores.
Kelly Harris-DeBerry
Kelly Harris-DeBerry received her MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass. She has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and Cave Canem. Some of her publishing credits include: 400yrs: The story of Black people in poems written from love 1619–2019, Words Beats & Life The Global Journal of Hip Hop, Angles in the Wilderness: Young and Black in New Orleans and Beyond, Torch Literary Magazine, The National Parks Service Centennial Commemoration publication with Sonia Sanchez, Yale University's Caduceus Journal, Southern Review, Say it Loud: Poems for James Brown and many more.…
Read MoreKelly Harris-DeBerry received her MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass. She has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and Cave Canem. Some of her publishing credits include: 400yrs: The story of Black people in poems written from love 1619–2019, Words Beats & Life The Global Journal of Hip Hop, Angles in the Wilderness: Young and Black in New Orleans and Beyond, Torch Literary Magazine, The National Parks Service Centennial Commemoration publication with Sonia Sanchez, Yale University’s Caduceus Journal, Southern Review, Say it Loud: Poems for James Brown and many more.
Her podcast episode for About Place Journal called Congo Square: Sustaining the Sacred Post-Katrina highlights her talents as a producer and researcher. Kelly is a former guest poetry editor for Bayou Magazine at the University of New Orleans. She serves her literary community as the New Orleans Poets & Writers’ Literary Coordinator and on various community boards. Kelly is a cultural leader with business savvy.
Megan Hart
Megan Hart writes books. Some of them use bad words, but most of the other words are okay. Some of them hit bestseller lists and win awards and some don’t, but that’s the way it goes. She can’t live without music, the internet, or the ocean, but she and soda have achieved an amicable uncoupling. She loathes the feeling of corduroy or velvet, and modern art leaves her cold. She writes a little bit of everything from horror to romance, though she’s best known for writing steamy fiction that sometimes makes you cry. Find out more about her at meganhart.com, or if you really want to get crazy, follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/megan_hart and Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/readinbed.
David Hassler
David Hassler, MFA directs the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. In 2009, he cofounded Traveling Stanzas, a community arts project which creates illustrations in response to poems generated from community workshops in schools, healthcare facilities, libraries, senior centers, and veterans’ organizations. Hassler is the author or editor of ten books of poetry and nonfiction, including Dear Vaccine: Global Voices Speak to the Pandemic; Growing Season: The Life of a Migrant Community; and Speak a Powerful Magic: Ten Years of the Traveling Stanzas Poetry Project. His play, May 4th Voices: Kent State, 1970, based on the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project, was published by The Kent State University Press along with a Teacher’s Resource Book and was produced in 2020 as a national radio play by the WKSU NPR station. Hassler’s awards include Ohio Poet of the Year, the Ohioana Book Award, and the Carter G. Woodson Honor Book Award. His TEDx talk, “The Conversation of Poetry,” conveys the power of poetry to strengthen communities. In addition to his creative writing publications, he has co-authored articles on poetry, technology, and healing in the Journal of Palliative Medicine, the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, and the Online Journal of Issues in Nursing.
Anastasia Hastings
Anastasia Hastings is from Brecksville, Ohio. Her newest release is book #2 of the Dear Miss Hermione historical mystery series, Of Hoaxes and Homicide. Publishers Weekly called the book “captivating” and gave it a starred review. The first book of the series, Of Manners and Murder” has been praised by The Wall Street Journal as evoking “…the shocking revelations of Wilkie Collins, the social acuity of Janes Austen and the comic melodrama of Oscar Wilde.” Learn more at: https://www.mystery-book-series.com/.
Sharon Hatfield
About Sharon Hatfield
Sharon Hatfield grew up loving Nancy Drew mysteries and listening to her grandmother read Grimm’s Fairy Tales aloud. Years later, she’s still interested in mysteries of various kinds, which has influenced her choice of nonfiction book topics. Her newest book, Enchanted Ground: The Spirit Room of Jonathan Koons, was published by Ohio University Press in October 2018.
A native of Ewing, Virginia, she began writing poems and stories at an early age. After earning undergraduate degrees in English and biology at Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee, she became a newspaper reporter in Virginia. Sharon moved to Ohio in 1985 and later earned a master’s degree in journalism from Ohio University and an MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College in Maryland. She has worked as a reporter, editor, English professor and manuscript consultant.
Sharon has twice received an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, most recently in spring 2018 for her work on Enchanted Ground. Her previous book Never Seen the Moon: The Trials of Edith Maxwell won the Weatherford and Chaffin awards for nonfiction.
She has served as a panelist for the Kentucky Arts Council and on the faculty of the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop in Hindman, Kentucky, and the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival in Harrogate, Tennessee. In her adopted hometown of Athens, Ohio, she is a member of the Southeast Ohio History Center and is active in environmental work. She also volunteers as an adviser to the Jenco Fund of the Foundation for Appalachian Ohio, an endowment that supports visionary leadership in the region.
About the Book
Enchanted Ground addresses spiritualism as a 19th-century religious movement and explains the place of Jonathan Koons and his family within it. The movement began in western New York in 1848 and extended into the cities and rural communities of the Midwest. Curious visitors travelled from as far as New Orleans to Athens County, Ohio, to a remote country cabin whose marvels would rival any of P. T. Barnum’s attractions. People dressed in homespun crowded in with those in city attire to experience what spiritualist Jonathan Koons and his son Nahum would demonstrate in the pitch dark of the log cabin night after night.
Jonathan Koons was considered one of the most impressive physical mediums of the 1850s. His Athens County “spirit room,” built specifically for theatrical-style séances, was known for a musical “angel band” that allegedly played along as Jonathan fiddled. On some evenings the audience was also treated to the appearance of spectral hands that scribbled messages on sheets of paper. Today Koons is considered by historians of religion to be the innovator of the trumpet used for voice communication in séances. Replicas of his famed spirit room were built in Ohio, Indiana, Massachusetts and beyond. Hatfield’s Enchanted Ground is not only a portrait of a charismatic medium, but the story of a countercultural force that shook American religion in the 19th-century.