Elizabeth McConnaughey hails from Columbus, Ohio, and excels in the light lyric oratorio and operatic repertoire. Ms. McConnaughey has a passion for Baroque and Early Music literature, having performed the roles of Belinda in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Second Midwife in Play of Herod, the title role of Thisbe in Lampe's Pyramus and Thisbe, and covering the role of Damon Handel’s Acis and Galatea.  Since completing her Master’s degree at Indiana University, Ms. McConnaughey has performed throughout central Ohio with Opera Project Columbus, The Early Interval, Lancaster Chorale, and First Congregational Church.

Laurie Anderson is a plant ecologist and holder of the Morris Family Professorship in Natural Sciences in the Department of Botany and Microbiology at Ohio Wesleyan University. She is also President of the Board of Directors for the Ecological Research as Education Network (EREN). Anderson’s research and teaching interests include temperate forest ecology, invasive plants, global environmental change, environmental issues in food production, and developing collaborative ecological projects across small colleges. She leads travel courses on global change in Brazil, Utah and Alaska. In 2015, she was recognized as the Ohio Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.

Christian Formoso is a Chilean poet. Among his verse collections are: Puerto de hambre (2005), El cementerio más hermoso de Chile (2008), bellezamericana (2014), and WWM —Walt Whitman Mall— (2020). Some of his poems have been translated to English, French, German and Greek and have appeared in anthologies, in Chile and abroad. Among other distinctions, he was awarded the National Council Prize for the Best Book Published in Chile for El cementerio más hermoso de Chile in 2009 and the Pablo Neruda Prize of the Pablo Neruda Foundation in 2010. He teaches Latin American Literature at Universidad de Magallanes and holds an MFA and a PhD in Hispanic Literature and Languages from Stony Brook University.

​Amelia Christmas Gramling is a Provost Visiting Writer and a graduate of the Nonfiction Writing Program at Iowa. In the classroom and in her own creative work, she's interested in how the medium and methods of nonfiction writing can be instrumented as a tool of preservation of places, people, and landscapes that have been and continue to be systematically erased. 

Amelia is also interested in integrating visual and performance artforms into the writing classroom. Before she came to Iowa she taught creative writing at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio as an Artist in Residence for the Pages Integrative Arts Program. Amelia's background in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality studies also continues to inform her work in the classroom and outside of it.

Terry Hermsen is Professor Emeritus of English at Otterbein University. He has published four books of poems, including The River’s Daughter and A House for Last Year’s Summer, along with Poetry of Place: Helping Students Write Their Worlds (NCTE/2009). He has taught poetry for Ohio Arts Council in over 100 schools, along with EECO’s Language of Nature workshops at Cuyahoga Valley Environmental Education Center. He has led “poetry night hikes” in several state parks around Ohio--and in Vermont and California. Since 2017, Terry has sought to bring together climate change initiatives across colleges in central Ohio. In August of 2021, he released an album of climate/earth songs entitled “Dance Floor at the Edge of Time,” which he has performed Cleveland, Columbus, Bluffton and Sandusky in Ohio, as well as in Kentucky, Indiana, Maryland,  Vermont and the University of Iowa.

With a specialty in the fusing of multiple styles and cultures, percussionist and composer Joseph Krygier wields his background in classical, world, commercial and electronic music to forge a sound that is uniquely his own.

In 2005, Dionne Custer Edwards, Director of Learning & Public Practice, joined the Wexner Center for the Arts. Her work at the Wex has included pioneering several groundbreaking education programs—including Pages, an
art and writing program—serving hundreds of high school students a year from across central Ohio. Embedded in her art and education practices is Dionne’s commitment to work in diversity, equity, inclusion, and access. In partnership with Wex board member, Alex
Shumate, Dionne helped to conceptualize and sustain the work of the Shumate Council—a group of Wex supporters, ambassadors, and volunteers; committed to diversity, inclusion, and access. Dionne has received awards and fellowships for her work in the arts, including a 12-month fellowship with Americans for the Arts. Dionne has presented and been a featured speaker at several national conferences on her work and research in arts education—including at the Indianapolis Museum of Art TEDx conference—where she spoke on 21st century learning. She also regularly serves as a trustee on nonprofit organization boards and serves on panels for arts and grantmaking organizations. While Dionne is an arts educator, arts administrator, and programmer—she is also a practicing artist. She has published critical and literary writing, internationally and nationally in Sanat Dünyamiz (“Our Art World”), Turkey; Journal GEARTE, Brazil; and in the University of Arizona’s Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in 3Elements Review, Barren Magazine, Entropy Magazine, Flock, Gordon Square Review, Grist, Porter House Review, Storm Cellar, The Seventh Wave, Tahoma Literary Review, and others. Dionne has a MA in Arts Education and Creative Writing, Antioch University and a BA in English, The Ohio State University.

Jeffrey Gene Gundy (born 1952 Flanagan, Illinois) is an American poet of Mennonite descent based in Ohio. Gundy has written eight books of poetry and four books of creative nonfiction and literary criticism, and was awarded the Ohio Poet of the Year in 2015. He teaches at Bluffton University. He debuted with Inquiries in 1992, followed by Flatlands in 1995. His subsequent books of poems include Without a Plea, Somewhere Near Defiance, Abandoned Homeland, Spoken among the Trees, Rhapsody with Dark Matter and Deerflies. His prose books include Songs from an Empty Cage: Poetry, Mystery, Anabaptism, and Peace, and A Community of Memory: My Days with George and Clara. He is also known
as an important contributor to Mennonite literary criticism.

The pandemic period has been a time when our communities have been demanding justice, including campaigns like #BlackLivesMatter. This next poems is a clever play on the 1852 anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, posing difficult questions about racist violence that still remains in America post-slavery.

Travis McClerking is a Sophomore at OSU majoring in English, who was  introduced to poetry through competitive slams. He continues to develop his craft in the famous open mics held at Kafe Kerouac. He pays tribute to his high school teacher Dr. Sidney Jones and the Columbus native, Hanif Abdurraquib, as his biggest influences.

The Storialist is Hannah Stephenson, a poet, writer, editor, and instructor living in Columbus, Ohio. She is the author of Cadence (Wick Poetry Center--Kent State University Press, In the Kettle, the Shriek (Gold Wake Press), series Co-Editor for New Poetry of the Midwest (New American Press, editor of The Ides of March: An Anthology of Ohio Poets (Columbus Creative Cooperative).  Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, 32 Poems, Vela, The Journal, and Poetry Daily. She is founder and curator (along with Paige Webb and Anisa Gandevivala) of Paging Columbus!, a literary arts event series. If you are a writer in Columbus or swinging through Central Ohio, and you'd like to chat about reading for Paging Columbus, please get in touch.