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.
Dorri Steinhoff
Dorri Steinhoff grew up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago where she developed a love of nature, art and architecture. She met Joe Kuspan while in graduate school in Cincinnati. Their common interest in art and architecture led to numerous design and renovation projects including two boutique shops in the Short North Art District of Columbus, Ohio and five central Ohio homes. They are currently enjoying watching the seasons change at Glenbrow with their two daughters, Maren and Sofia, while continuing to restore the 1964 Glenbrow tower.
Dior J. Stephens
Dior J. Stephens is a proud Midwestern pisces poet. He is the author of the chapbooks SCREAMS & lavender, 001, and CANNON!, all with Ghost City Press. Dior holds an MFA in Creative Writing from California College of the Arts and is currently a doctoral candidate in the Philosophy program at the University of Cincinnati. CRUEL/CRUEL is his debut collection of poetry.
Aileen Stewart
Aileen Stewart is the award winning author of the Fern Valley Series which includes Fern Valley, Return to Fern Valley, and Cooking in Fern Valley, as well as the new Quack and Daisy Picture Book Series, a public speaker, amateur photographer, a blogger, and SCBWI member. In addition, she hosts writing workshops for children in first to sixth grade, offers library and school visits, and speaks at events. She resides in lovely Shelby, Ohio with her beautiful daughter, wonderful husband, and their crazy cats Max, Daisy, and Fluffy. Her motto is “Kids Who Read Can Do Anything!”
Leah Stewart
Leah Stewart is the author of the novels Body of a Girl, The Myth of You and Me, Husband and Wife, The History of Us, and The New Neighbor. The daughter of an Air Force officer and an elementary school teacher, she lived as a child in Virginia, Idaho, England, Kansas, and Virginia again. She went to high school in Clovis, New Mexico (a town featured in her second novel, The Myth of You and Me), college at Vanderbilt University, and graduate school at the University of Michigan. Since then, she has lived in Boston and Chapel Hill and held visiting writer positions at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee; Vanderbilt University; and Murray State University in Kentucky. Now a professor at the University of Cincinnati, she lives in Cincinnati with her husband and two children. In 2010, she was the recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship and in 2014 the recipient of a Sachs Fund Prize, given for contributions to Cincinnati arts and culture. Her fourth novel, The History of Us, which is set in Cincinnati, is on the Choose to Read Ohio list for 2015–16. For more, go to leahstewart.com
R.T. Stewart
In the early 1980s, R. T. Stewart was hired by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Division of Wildlife, as a uniformed state wildlife officer. However, the agency soon discovered Stewart had special skills as an undercover officer. Thus began his 18-year career infiltrating poaching rings–often living with poachers for months or even years on end–and eventually bringing the bad guys to justice. The book, Poachers Were My Prey: Eighteen Years as an Undercover Wildlife Officer, is Stewart’s first-hand account of his various, exciting undercover investigations in Ohio, the Midwest, and beyond. Now retired, R. T. Stewart lives in rural southeast Ohio.
Deanne Stillman
Deanne Stillman is a widely published, critically acclaimed writer. Her latest book is Blood Brothers, praised by Douglas Brinkley as “a landmark achievement in American history,” and recipient of a starred review in Kirkus and named “a best book of the year” by True West and the Millions). She also wrote Desert Reckoning (based on a Rolling Stone piece; it was an amazon editors pick, Spur Award and LA Press Club Award winner, and praised in Newsweek), and Mustang, an LA Times “best book of the year” which helped launch the current conversation about wild horses and burros in America. It’s now available in audio with Anjelica Huston, Frances Fisher, John Densmore, Wendie Malick and Richard Portnow. Additionally, Deanne wrote the cult classic, Twentynine Palms, a Los Angeles Times bestseller that Hunter Thompson called “A strange and brilliant story by an important American writer.” She writes the “Letter from the West” column for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and her work has been published in literary hub, salon, slate, Tin House, the NY Times, LA Times, Orion, Angels Flight – Literary West and elsewhere. Her essays are in many anthologies and her plays have been produced and won prizes around the country. She’s a member of the core faculty at the UC Riverside-Palm Desert MFA Low Residency Creative Writing Program, where she teaches nonfiction.
Deanne Stillman
Deanne Stillman is a widely published, critically acclaimed writer. Her books include Blood Brothers (which received a starred review in Kirkus and appears on several “best of 2017” lists, including two at the millions, and won the 2018 Ohioana Award in nonfiction); Desert Reckoning (winner of the Spur and LA Press Club Awards for nonfiction), and Mustang, a Los Angeles Times “best book of the year.” Mustang is now out in audio with Anjelica Huston, Frances Fisher, Wendie Malick, Richard Portnow, and John Densmore. In addition, she wrote the cult classic, Twentynine Palms, a Los Angeles Times bestseller that Hunter Thompson called “A strange and brilliant story by an important American writer.” She writes the “Letter from the West” column for the Los Angeles Review of Books and is a member of the core faculty at the UC Riverside-Palm Desert MFA Low Residency Creative Writing Program.
Deanne Stillman
Deanne Stillman is a widely published, critically acclaimed writer. Her books include Blood Brothers (Ohioana Book Award winner, starred review, Kirkus; “best of the West 2018,” True West Magazine); Desert Reckoning (winner of the Spur and LA Press Club Awards for nonfiction, an amazon editors pick, based on a Rolling Stone piece), and Mustang, a Los Angeles Times “best book of the year.” In addition, she wrote the cult classic, Twentynine Palms, a Los Angeles Times bestseller that Hunter Thompson called “A strange and brilliant story by an important American writer.” She writes the “Letter from the West” column for the Los Angeles Review of Books and her plays have been produced and won prizes around the country. She’s a member of the core faculty at the UC Riverside-Palm Desert MFA Low Residency Creative Writing Program, where she teaches nonfiction.
https://www.newsweek.com/blood-brothers-sitting-bull-buffalo-bill-book-book-excerpt-674632
https://themillions.com/2017/11/reconciling-americas-original-sin-the-millions-interviews-deanne-stillman.html
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/locked-out-of-time-a-conversation-with-deanne-stillman/
Alison Stine
ALISON STINE is the author of the novel Trashlands (MIRA / HarperCollins), which The LA Times called a “ballad to love in a time of darkness,” longlisted for the 2022 Reading the West Book Award, a current finalist for the Ohioana Book Award and currently longlisted for the 2022 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.…
Read MoreALISON STINE is the author of the novel Trashlands (MIRA / HarperCollins), which The LA Times called a “ballad to love in a time of darkness,” longlisted for the 2022 Reading the West Book Award, a current finalist for the Ohioana Book Award and currently longlisted for the 2022 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Her first novel Road Out of Winter won the 2021 Philip K. Dick Award.
She is also the author of three poetry collections published on university presses and a novella. Her next novel Dust will be published by Wednesday Books (Macmillan) in fall 2023.
Recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Ohio Arts Council grant, a Sustainable Arts grant, and a reporting grant from National Geographic, she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a Ruth Lilly Fellow from the Poetry Foundation, and received the Studs Terkel Award for Media and Journalism.
Partially deaf, she is the Staff Culture Writer at Salon, and has also reported for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, 100 Days in Appalachia, and more. After living in rural Ohio for many years, where she was raised and where her son was born, she now lives in Colorado with her family. Check out her website: https://www.alisonstine.com/