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.
Josh Rolnick
Josh Rolnick’s short story collection, “Pulp and Paper,” won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, selected by Yiyun Li. His short stories have won the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize and the Florida Review Editor’s Choice Prize. They have been published in Harvard Review, Western Humanities Review, Bellingham Review, and Gulf Coast, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New American Voices. Josh holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and an MA in Writing from The Johns Hopkins University. He formerly served as fiction editor at the Iowa Review as well as Unstuck: A literary annual. Josh has taught writing at the University of Iowa and Chautauqua Institution in Western New York, and has appeared as a guest lecturer at Johns Hopkins and Akron University. He currently serves as an advisor for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and teaches fiction writing at the Sackett Street Writer’s Workshop.
Photo: Nancy Williams
Robert Roman
Robert J. Roman was born in Connecticut and raised in Ohio. He attended The Ohio
State University where he double-majored in psychology and American history/American
studies. There he saw tens of thousands of students, who otherwise seemed to
agree on almost nothing, be of one mind about their football team. He holds a master’s
degree in psychology from New York University and currently lives in New York City.
Mar Romasco-Moore
Mar Romasco-Moore is the author of the novels Deadstream (forthcoming 2025), I Am the Ghost in Your House, Krazyland, and Some Kind of Animal, as well as the multimedia flash fiction collection Ghostographs. They teach writing at Columbus College of Art and Design. Learn more at: https://marromascomoore.com/
Stepfanie Romine
Born and raised in Ohio, Stepfanie Romine is a cookbook author, health coach and yoga teacher who has lived and cooked on three continents. After spending a year teaching English in South Korea and later discovering Ashtanga yoga, she turned her passion for health and wellness into a career. For several years, Stepfanie was the editorial director for the online healthy living community SparkPeople.com, then she worked as a copywriter and recipe developer for an herbal products manufacturer in western North Carolina. She now writes about natural health and wellness and teaches cooking classes in the Asheville area.
Stepfanie has been a registered yoga teacher since 2009, and she is also a certified health coach through the American Council on Exercise. She has completed courses in herbal supplements, ayurveda and holistic and integrative nutrition.
Cooking helped Stepfanie lose 40 pounds over a decade ago — and she’s kept it off ever since. Today she cooks healthy, seasonal, plant-based meals to fuel her running and her husband’s long-distance road cycling. Stepfanie is the co-author of The No Meat Athlete Cookbook, The SparkPeople Cookbook and The Spark Solution.
Find her at The Flexible Kitchen, or connect with her via Instagram, Twitter or Facebook.
A.J. Romriell
AJ Romriell is a Pushcart-nominated writer and educator, originally from Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the author of Wolf Act (2025), a memoir that earned first prize in the Utah Original Writing Competition and was a finalist for the Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Contest. His essays, stories, and poems have been featured in The Missouri Review, Black Warrior Review, Brevity, New Delta Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Utah, he is now a Presidential Fellow at The Ohio State University where he writes about queerness, fairy tales, video games, apocalypse narratives, HIV, and more. When not writing, he can be found making a mean latte or playing hide and seek with his cat.
Mike Roos
Mike Roos is Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College, where he has been employed since 1976. He grew up in southern Indiana and played basketball for Tell City High School, graduating in 1970. He worked for two years as a sportswriter for the Tell City News. In addition to having published numerous scholarly articles, he is also a singer-songwriter and has released three albums of his own material.
Read MoreMike Roos is Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College, where he has been employed since 1976. He grew up in southern Indiana and played basketball for Tell City High School, graduating in 1970. He worked for two years as a sportswriter for the Tell City News. In addition to having published numerous scholarly articles, he is also a singer-songwriter and has released three albums of his own material.
Emilia Rosa
Emilia Rosa was raised in Brazil. During her childhood she lived in Rio de Janeiro, where every sunny weekend was generally spent at the beach. Having moved to South of Brazil, she holds fond memories of summer vacations spent with her married sister in Rio, which also involved many hours at the beach. Her love for the sea and Rio de Janeiro, as well as that city’s history, permeates the pages of her first fiction book, “Finding Cristina.” During her teens she avidly read in Portuguese, Spanish, English, French and Italian. A few years ago she developed a love for murder mysteries written during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Emilia moved back to the United States several years ago. She has published poetry and is finishing Finding Cristina: A New Life, the sequel to Finding Cristina. Her readers can contact her on Facebook/Instagram/Goodreads (Emilia Rosa Author), and Twitter (EmliaURosa1).
Rafael Rosado
Born in Puerto Rico and based in Columbus, Ohio, Rafael Rosado is a seasoned writer, director and storyboard artist for the animation industry. After five years honing his skills in Los Angeles, Rafael moved back to Ohio to raise his family. He is now one of the most highly sought-after storyboard artists, working for major studios such as Warner Brothers, The Walt Disney Company, Sony, Universal and the Cartoon Network. Rafael’s first graphic novel, Giants Beware!, was published by First Second Books in early 2012. His short film The Tortured Clown was acquired by and featured on the Sundance Channel.
Jerry Roscoe
Jerry Roscoe is the author of Mirror Lake (contained in Two Midwest Voices) which received the Ohioana Book Award for 2002, The Unexamined Life and the chapbook S-E-X. Published widely in literary journals, he has received two Individual Artist Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has had his poems read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. For ten years he was poetry reviewer and columnist for The Columbus Dispatch.
Michael J. Rosen
In his various roles, Michael has created more than 150 books over a forty- year career. His wide range of books for young readers range from Chanukah Lights, a poetic collaboration with pop-up master Robert Sabuda (Candlewick) to Our Farm: Four Seasons with Five Kids on One Family’s Farm (Darby Creek/Lerner), a 144-page oral history of an Ohio farm family that he photo-chronicled and supplemented with sidebars of local- and natural history.
Many of his books engage his degree in zoology, medical-school training, and his passion for nature and the creatures who share this world. For the last 22 years, he’s lived on 100 forested acres in the foothills of the Appalachians, east of Columbus, Ohio, where he spent most of his life. Workman Publishing released three volumes of heavily researched writing: his comprehensive, go-to-handbook, My Dog! A Kids’ Guide to Keeping a Happy, Healthy Dog; his eco-wise guide to freshwater fishing, Kids’ Book of Fishing; and The 60-Second Encyclopedia, a witty fact- and math-packed compendium of minute-measurements that come from nearly every subject area. Candlewick published four volumes of jos haiku with natural-history endnotes on birds, on cats, on dogs, and on horses. His latest book from Doubleday, In the Quiet, NOISY Woods, is a cumulative sound narrative of eight creatures who share his acres.
Fifteen of his books including SPEAK!, Down to Earth, and The Greatest Table (Harcourt), and Home (HarperCollins) were created with the generosity of hundreds of the country’s best-known illustrators, photographers, authors, and cartoonists as creative philanthropy. Along with several adult books, profits from these collections benefitted Share Our Strength’s work to end childhood hunger and a granting program Rosen created, The Company of Animals Fund, that awarded over $375,000 to 100 animal-welfare organizations.
Among the many distinguished citations his work have received are:
• The Sydney Taylor Book Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries for Chanukah Lights. (Candlewick)
• The inaugural Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance Once Upon a World Book Award for the best children’s book that promotes diversity and tolerance for A School for Pompey Walker. (Harcourt) This is a book-length, first-person narrative based on the true story of a man who repeatedly sold himself into and escaped from slavery in order to build a school for children in Ohio.
• The Ohioana Library Career Citation awarded by the state of Ohio.
• The National Jewish Book Award for Elijah’s Angel, a picture book based on Rosen’s friendship with the renowned folk artist Elijah Pierce.
• Share Our Strength’s first lifetime achievement away for his creative and devotion to ending childhood hunger in America.
Several of his books have been Junior Library Guild featured selections and Scholastic Book Club picks, while others have been featured as “Best Books of the Year” by Kirkus, CCBC, Bank Street Books, Hungry Mind Review, Essence, The Today Show, The Horn Book, Miami Herald, and the ASPCA. His works have been adapted as a PBS documentary (“Our Farm: Four Seasons with Five Kids on One Family Farm”); a family opera (composer Robert Kapilow’s “Elijah’s Angel”); and a short film (director Christopher Rowley’s “The Remembering Movies”).
Among his recent books are Sailing the Unknown: Around the World with Captain Cook, a free-verse diary based on the life of a stowaway who sailed aboard the ship Endeavor for over a thousand days. (Creative Editions)
• Mind-Boggling Numbers (Millbrook/Lerner). Ms. Mary Math unpacks a dozen doozies in a humorous, arithmetic ramp through such unlikely story problems as how long would it take to hike to the moon, how many earthworms are in an acre, and how long would it take someone to mow the lawn if everyone on Earth had the same size yard.
• Outrageous Animal Adaptations (Twenty-first Century Books/Lerner), a middle-grade guide to two dozen profiles of creatures who occupy the most extreme, hazardous, and competitive niches on the planet.
• The Tale of Rescue (Candlewick), a short novel about a cattle dog who heroically saves a family lost in an Ohio blizzard—“a lovely prose-poem adventure,” wrote Publishers’ Weekly in a starred review.
Michael has been active in professional development, writers’ residencies, curriculum development, and creative-writing workshops with readers, writers, and teachers for over 40 years, including 20 years as program director of the Thurber House, a literary center in Columbus, Ohio. His fifth and sixth collection of Thurber’s uncollected and unpublished works were published in conjunction with the humorist’s 125th birthday: Collected Fables (HarperCollins) and A Mile and a Half of Lines: The Art of James Thurber (Ohio State University Press).