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.
Richard J. Norgard
R.J. Norgard was born and raised on Port Clinton, Ohio, a stone’s throw from the shores of Lake Erie. He began working as a reporter and photographer for the local newspaper while still in high school before embarking on a career in the U.S. Army in the field of counterintelligence. Upon his retirement, he went into business as a private investigator in Alaska, work that would later proved invaluable when he penned his first detective novel, Trophy Kill. After spending 21 years in Alaska, he has returned to his hometown where he devotes his time to writing as well as volunteering in he local community. As president of the Port Clinton Lighthouse Conservancy, he a written a book-length history of the of the town’s historic pier lighthouse. He resides with his partner, Suzy, on Catawba Island and is currently working on his second Sidney Reed novel.
Michael Nye
Michael Nye is the author of the story collection STRATEGIES AGAINST EXTINCTION (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2012) and the novel ALL THE CASTLES BURNED, forthcoming from Turner Publishing in February 2018.
He was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. He attended the Ohio State University, where he graduated with a BA in English Literature, and the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where he earned his MFA in creative writing.
His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in American Literary Review, Boulevard, Cincinnati Review, Crab Orchard Review, Epoch, Kenyon Review, New South, Normal School, Sou’wester, and South Dakota Review, among many others. His work has been a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in fiction and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He lives with his wife in Columbus, Ohio.
Phillip J Obermiller
Phillip J. Obermiller is a senior visiting scholar in the School of Planning at the University of Cincinnati and a fellow at the University of Kentucky Appalachian Center. He is the author of numerous books on Appalachia and both black and white Appalachians.
Joe Oestreich
Joe Oestreich is the author of the memoir Hitless Wonder: A Life in Minor League Rock and Roll. A graduate of the Ohio State University MFA Program in Creative Writing, his work has appeared in Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Ninth Letter, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere. He has been awarded a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, honored by The Atlantic Monthly, and shortlisted in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007, The Best American Essays 2008 and 2009, and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses 2010. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC, where he co-edits Waccamaw.
Nnedi Okorafor
Nnedi’s works include WHO FEARS DEATH (in development at HBO into a TV series), the BINTI novella trilogy (optioned and in development with Media Res), THE BOOK OF PHOENIX, the NSIBIDI SCRIPTS SERIES and LAGOON. She is the winner of Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Locus and Lodestar Awards and her debut novel ZAHRAH THE WINDSEEKER won the prestigious Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature.…
Read MoreNnedi’s works include WHO FEARS DEATH (in development at HBO into a TV series), the BINTI novella trilogy (optioned and in development with Media Res), THE BOOK OF PHOENIX, the NSIBIDI SCRIPTS SERIES and LAGOON. She is the winner of Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Locus and Lodestar Awards and her debut novel ZAHRAH THE WINDSEEKER won the prestigious Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature.
Nnedi has also written an Africanfuturist comic series LAGUARDIA (winner of the Hugo and Eisner Award); comics for Marvel, including BLACK PANTHER: LONG LIVE THE KING and WAKANDA FOREVER (featuring the Dora Milaje) and the SHURI series; and her short memoir BROKEN PLACES AND OUTER SPACES.
Nnedi holds a PhD (literature) and two MAs (journalism and literature). She lives with her daughter Anyaugo and family in Phoenix, Arizona. Learn more at: https://nnedi.com/
Michael Olin-Hitt
Michael Olin-Hitt is a Professor of English at the University of Mount Union in Alliance, Ohio, where he teaches creative writing, American literature, and Native American literature. In addition to the novel The Homegoing, he has published nine short stories in various literary journals, such as The Nebraska Review, The Notre Dame Review, The Other Side, and Puerto Del Sol. He has also published two works of nonfiction on spirituality: The Word of God Upon My Lips and A Fish Made of Water. He was born in Dayton, and has lived in Ohio his entire life. Currently, he lives in Uniontown with his wife and two children.
Robert Olmstead
Robert Olmstead is the author of The Coldest Night Coal Black Horse, published in 2008, and the winner of the Heartland Prize for Fiction, the Ohioana Award for fiction, a #1 Book Sense Pick, and a Borders Original Voices pick. It was also a 2011-2012 Choose to Read Ohio adult title. The Coldest Night, released in April 2012 was selected as an Editors’ Pick for Amazon’s Best of 2012 list, a Publishers Weekly pick for Best Books of the Year, and a Kirkus Reviews’ Top 25 Fiction Books of 2012.Olmstead is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and an NEA grant, and he is currently a professor of English and Director of Ohio Wesleyan’s Creative Writing Program.…
Read MoreRobert Olmstead is the author of The Coldest Night Coal Black Horse, published in 2008, and the winner of the Heartland Prize for Fiction, the Ohioana Award for fiction, a #1 Book Sense Pick, and a Borders Original Voices pick. It was also a 2011-2012 Choose to Read Ohio adult title. The Coldest Night, released in April 2012 was selected as an Editors’ Pick for Amazon’s Best of 2012 list, a Publishers Weekly pick for Best Books of the Year, and a Kirkus Reviews’ Top 25 Fiction Books of 2012.Olmstead is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and an NEA grant, and he is currently a professor of English and Director of Ohio Wesleyan’s Creative Writing Program. He previously served as Senior Writer in Residence at Dickinson College and as director of the creative writing program at Boise State University. Visit Robert’s website, http://www.robertolmsteadbooks.com/.
Mike Olszewski
Mike Olszewski is a veteran radio personality best known for his work at the legendary WMMS-FM. He is an educator teaching a wide range of media, speech and communications classes at Kent State University, the University of Akron and Notre Dame College. Mike is also the curator and archivist for the Ohio Broadcast Archive and Museum, a statewide project at the University of Akron documenting the history of Ohio’s radio and television.
Kristen Orlando
Writing is one of the great loves of Kristen Orlando’s life and she has been lucky enough to make it her living, first as a television producer, then as a marketer and now as a novelist. Kristen graduated with a B.A. in English literature from Kenyon College. She lives in Columbus, Ohio with the other great love of her life, Michael.
Susan Orlean
What can I tell you? I am the product of a happy and relatively uneventful childhood in Cleveland, Ohio (back when the Indians were still a lousy team, and before they became a really good team and then again became a somewhat lousy team, although I have hope again…) This was followed by a happy and relatively squandered college career at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (back when Ann Arbor hosted a Hash Bash every spring). I studied literature and history and always dreamed of being a writer, but had no idea of how you went about being a writer – or at least the kind of writer I wanted to be: someone who wrote long stories about interesting things, rather than news stories about short-lived events. There is no guidebook to becoming that kind of writer, so I assumed I’d end up doing something practical like going to law school, much as the thought of it made me cringe. After college, I moved to Portland, Oregon (back when Portland was cappuccino-free) to kill some time before the inevitable trek to law school – and amazingly enough I lucked into a writing job at a tiny now-defunct monthly magazine. That led to a job at an alternative newsweekly in Portland where I wrote music reviews and feature pieces. While I was in Portland, Mt. St. Helens erupted; I started writing for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice; I learned to cross-country ski; I failed to learn how to cook.
I moved to Boston in 1982 (back before they built the Ted Williams Tunnel and long before the Red Sox reversed the curse). I wrote for the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Globe, and started work on my first book, Saturday Night. Four years later I moved to New York. I learned how to order take-out food; wrote The Orchid Thief; became a staff writer at The New Yorker; got married. A few years ago, we moved to Los Angeles—kind of by accident, but, as it turns out, a happy accident, and for the time being we’re staying put.
These days, I spend most of my time writing for The New Yorker and working on books. My side projects? I do a weekly column for Medium, run a book club on Literati, have lots of speaking engagements, and do some television writing, including a stint on How to With John Wilson (HBO) and the forthcoming adaptation of The Library Book.
Visit her website at: http://www.susanorlean.com/author/