Columbus Book Festival

This coming weekend on Saturday July 12 and Sunday July 13, you can find me in the Ohio Horror Writers Association tent in Topiary Park for the Columbus Book Festival. The festival is free, and will feature musical and poetry performances, author readings and author discussions, food trucks, and more. View the PDF of their schedule for details. The festival runs from 10am-6pm Saturday and 10am-5pm Sunday.

The Ohio HWA tent is #79, and I plan to be there both days. Who else will you find in the tent? Authors Sarah Hans, D.M Guay, Rami Ungar, S. Alessandro Martinez, John Kachuba, Neil Sater, John Ward, Kyle Collins, and Marvin Brown will be there, and Matt Dinniman will be taking time off from his duties as a featured author to hang out with us.

Featured authors at the festival include:

Amal El-Mohtar is a Hugo Award-winning author of science fiction, fantasy, poetry and criticism, and the co-author of the New York Times bestseller This is How You Lose the Time War, written with Max Gladstone, which has been translated into over 10 languages. The River Has Roots, part fairytale and part murder ballad, is her hugely anticipated solo debut. She lives in Ottawa, Canada.

Victoria Christopher Murray’s Harlem Rhapsody is a bold and vibrant love story to the woman who ignited the Harlem Renaissance, written by a masterful storyteller. Victoria is a New York Times bestselling author of more than 30 novels, including The Personal Librarian and The First Ladies, both of which she coauthored with Marie Benedict. She is a NAACP Image Award Winner for Outstanding Literary Work for her novel Stand Your Ground, which was also a Library Journal Best Book of the Year.

E.M. Anderson (she/they) is a queer, neurodivergent writer and the author of The Remarkable Retirement of Edna Fisher and The Keeper of Lonely Spirits. Her work has appeared in SJ Whitby’s Awakenings: A Cute Mutants Anthology, Wyldblood Press’s From the Depths: A Fantasy Anthology, and Dark Horses: The Magazine of Weird Fiction. They have two master’s degrees and a feral passion for trees, birds, pole fitness, and Uncle Iroh.

Samira Ahmed is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of young adult novels Love, Hate & Other Filters, Internment, Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know and Hollow Fires, as well as the middle grade fantasy adventure series Amira & Hamza. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in anthologies including Take the Mic, Color Outside the Lines, Ink Knows No Borders, Vampires Never Get Old, and A Universe of Wishes.

Jarod K. Anderson has three best-selling collections of nature poetry, Field Guide to the Haunted Forest, Love Notes from the Hollow Tree, and Leaf Litter. His memoir Something in the Woods Loves You explores his lifelong struggle with depression through a lens of love and gratitude for the natural world. Jarod created and voices The CryptoNaturalist podcast, a scripted audio-fiction show about real adoration for imaginary wildlife. He lives in Ohio between a park and a cemetery.

Kristy Boyce played her first role-playing game in high school and has been friends with that group ever since. In fact, she married the DM. Nowadays, she teaches psychology as a senior lecturer at the Ohio State University. When she’s not spending time with her husband and son, she’s usually writing, reading, or watching happy reality TV. Kristy is the author of Dating and Dragons, Dungeons and Drama, Hot British Boyfriend, and Hot Dutch Daydream and lives in Pickerington, Ohio.

Nia Davenport attended the University of Southern California and studied Biological Sciences and Theatre. She has an M.A. in Secondary Education, and she teaches English and Biology. She is also the author of Out of Body and the adult sci-fi novels The Blood Trials and The Blood Gift. When she isn’t writing she enjoys vacationing with her family, skiing, and being a huge foodie.

Matt Dinniman is a writer and artist from Gig Harbor, Washington. He is the author of the best-selling Dungeon Crawler Carl series along with several other books about the end of the world. He doesn’t really hate Cocker Spaniels, and he plays bass in two bands.

Jennifer K. Lambert lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with her husband of over thirty years, his chocolate-lab assistance dog, two Maine coon cats who assist no one, and plentiful free-range lizards. She also writes as the multi-award-winning and bestselling author of 64 published titles, Jeffe Kennedy, primarily in epic fantasy romance.

P.H. Low is a Rhysling- and Locus-nominated Malaysian American writer and poet whose debut novel These Deathless Shores is now out from Orbit Books (US) and Angry Robot (UK). Their shorter work is published in Strange Horizons, Reactor, Fantasy Magazine, and Diabolical Plots, among others. P. H. has a bad habit of moving cities every few years, but can always be found online.

Ehigbor Okosun, or just Ehi, is the #1 International Bestselling author of The Tainted Blood duology, an action-packed adult epic fantasy. Raised across four continents, she now resides in the US, where she writes speculative fiction, mystery thrillers, and contemporary novels for adult and YA audiences. She writes in hopes of doing justice to the myths and traditions she grew up steeped in, and to honour her large, multiracial and multiethnic family. She is a graduate of UT Austin with degrees in Plan II Honors, Neurolinguistics, and English, as well as Chemistry and Pre-Medical studies. When she’s not reading, you can catch her bullet journalling, gaming, baking, singing, doing yoga and spending time with her loved ones.

From playing the DM in Dungeons and Dragons to writing fantasy novels, Nikhil Prabala loves storytelling, from the epic to the cozy and everywhere in between. The Duchess of Kokora is his first published novel. Born and raised in Austin, Texas, he graduated from Stanford in 2019 and is currently based in the Bay Area. In his free time he enjoys ballroom dancing, singing, playing the guitar, tabletop games, and spending time with friends and family.

Cynthia Reeves is the author of three books of fiction: the novel The Last Whaler, the novel-in-stories Falling Through the New World (winner of Gold Wake Press’s Fiction Award), and the novella Badlands (winner of Miami University Press’s Novella Prize). Her award-winning short stories, essays, and poetry have appeared widely and earned numerous Pushcart nominations. Most recently, her short story “The Last Glacier” was featured in If the Storm Clears, an anthology of speculative fiction that concerns the sublime in the natural world. A Hawthornden Fellow, Cynthia earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College and taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr and Rosemont Colleges.

Ruben Reyes Jr. is the son of two Salvadoran immigrants and the author of There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Harvard College, his writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Lightspeed Magazine, and other publications. Originally from Southern California, he now lives in Brooklyn.

Lindy Ryan is an award-winning author, anthologist, and short-film director whose books and anthologies have received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist and Library Journal. Several of her projects have been adapted for screen. Ryan is the current author-in-residence at Rue Morgue. Declared a “champion for women’s voices in horror” by Shelf Awareness, Ryan was named a Publishers Weekly Star Watch Honoree in 2020, and in 2022, was named one of horror’s most masterful anthology curators. Born and raised in Southeast Texas, Ryan currently resides on the East Coast. She is a professor at Rutgers University.

Vivian Shaw wears too many earrings and likes edged weapons and expensive ink, and, as an expat Brit born in Kenya, is not actually from anywhere. She has a BA in art history, an MFA in creative writing and publishing arts, and makes jewelry on the side. She is the author of the Dr. Greta Helsing contemporary fantasy series as well as the sci-fi/horror novella The Helios Syndrome. She reviews for The Washington Post and her short sci-fi/horror fiction has appeared in Uncanny, Pseudopod, and The Deadlands. She lives in Santa Fe with her wife, the Hugo-Award-winning author Arkady Martine.

Andrea Stewart is the Sunday Times Bestselling author of The Drowning Empire trilogy and The Gods Below. Her debut epic fantasy novel, The Bone Shard Daughter, was a finalist for the Goodreads Choice Award for Fantasy and Debut Novel, the Locus Award for Best First Novel, the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel, and the BookNest Award for Best Traditionally Published Novel. She now lives in sunny California, and in addition to writing, can be found herding cats, looking at birds, and falling down research rabbit holes.

Edward Underhill grew up in the suburbs of Wisconsin, where he could not walk to anything, so he had to make up his own adventures. He studied music in college, spent several years living in very small apartments in New York, and currently resides in California with his partner and a talkative black cat. He is the author of the young adult novels Always the Almost, This Day Changes Everything, and In Case You Read This. The In-Between Bookstore is his first novel for adults.

Neena Viel is a horror writer who lives in a cabin in the Washington woods with her husband and the best dog in the world. She grew up between Newburgh, New York and Jonesboro, Arkansas, and holds a Master’s in Public Service from the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service and a Bachelor’s in Communication Studies from Arkansas State University. Her passion for philanthropy (almost) rivals her love for ghost stories. Listen To Your Sister is her debut novel.

Nghi Vo is the author of the novels Siren Queen and The Chosen and the Beautiful, as well as the acclaimed novellas of the Singing Hills Cycle, which began with The Empress of Salt and Fortune. The series entries have been finalists for the Nebula Award, the Locus Award, and the Lambda Literary Award, and have won the Crawford Award, the Ignyte Award, and the Hugo Award. Born in Illinois, she now lives on the shores of Lake Michigan. She believes in the ritual of lipstick, the power of stories, and the right to change your mind.

Khan Wong is the author of The Circle Infinite, a finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award and long-listed for the British Science Fiction Association’s Best Novel for that same year, and Down in the Sea of Angels. In the past he has played cello for an earnest folk-rock duo, worked as an arts funder, and was an internationally known hula hoop teacher and performer.