Columbus Metropolitan Library hosts engaging national authors for talks, readings and discussions.

Ask questions and live chat with the guests from your computer or mobile device.

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Appalachian Ohio is home to a diverse population and a unique landscape. Join these authors as they celebrate the trials and triumphs of the Appalachian spirit in fiction.

The panelists will discuss their current and back catalog of books and answer audience questions.

Panel is moderated by Joe Miller from Columbus Metropolitan Library's Main Library.

Janet Beard was born and raised in East Tennessee, Janet Beard moved to New York to study screenwriting at NYU and went on to earn an MFA in creative writing from The New School. Her first novel, Beneath the Pines, was published in 2008, and her follow-up, The Atomic City Girls became an international bestseller 2018. Janet's latest novel, The Ballad of Laurel Springs, was released in 2021. She is the recipient of a 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in Fiction.

Tiffany McDaniel is an Ohio native whose writing is inspired by the rolling hills and woods of the land she knows. A poet and a visual artist, her debut novel, The Summer That Melted Everything, won the Guardian's Not the Booker award and the Ohioana Reader’s Choice Award. She is the author of Betty, an international bestseller and a Friends of American Writers Chicago, the Society of Midland Authors, Nautilus Book Award, and Ohioana Library Readers’ Choice Award winner. Her upcoming novel, On the Savage Side, will be released February 2023.

Carter Sickels is the author of the novel The Prettiest Star (Hub City Press), winner of the 2021 Ohioana Book Award in Fiction, the Southern Book Prize, and the Weatherford Award, and selected as a Kirkus Best Book of 2020 and a Best LGBT Book of 2020 by O Magazine. His debut novel The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury), a 2013 Oregon Book Award finalist and a Lambda Literary Award finalist, was adapted into a feature film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020 and is now streaming. Carter is the recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award. He is an associate professor at Eastern Kentucky University.

Jamie Lyn Smith is a writer, editor, teacher and activist. She is the Fiction Editor at BreakBread Magazine and a Consulting Editor for the Kenyon Review. Her work has appeared in The Pinch, The Mississippi Review, The Kenyon Review, American Literary Review, Yemassee, Bayou, and other fine literary magazines. She is currently working on Hometown, a novel about millennial crises and the rise of white nationalism in the rural Midwest, for which she received a 2020 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her short story collection, Township, was published by Cornerstone Press in January 2022.

Ohioana Book Festival: Appalachian Stories