Moeller’s Own WRITERIN-RESIDENCE

Now in its second year, Moeller’s writer-in-residence promotes and exemplifies the craft and ideals of professional writing, the creative arts, and the written word. Through innovative workshops, demonstrations, special programs, and working alongside other Moeller teachers and professional guests, the writerin-residence—alongside students—explores composition ranging from real-world occupational and business writing to personal expression via nonfiction, song, journaling, film, theatre, and literary and genre fiction. The writer-in-residence models professional artistry via a national and international career and reputation by publishing original work in books, magazines, and anthologies and fosters an environment throughout the Moeller community of creativity, self-expression, and better command and enjoyment of the language arts.

Geoffrey Girard writes nonfiction, thrillers, historicals, and speculative fiction and is a New York Times bestselling author who has published more than twenty books with traditional publishers. His books have been translated into German, Italian, Polish, and Turkish, and several have been optioned for film.

Mr. Girard has also taught at Moeller for nineteen years, and was the department chair of English for ten years before being named Moeller’s first writer-in-residence. He currently teaches honors freshman English and the creative writing elective, and has also taught writing at Miami University, Seton Hill University, and Mount St. Joseph University, where he was an adjunct professor teaching courses in both writing and short fiction. At Moeller, he’s also taught journalism, horror and Gothic fiction, AP English Literature and Composition, and philosophy in literature. He’s been a guest speaker or led writing workshops at many festivals and conferences, including the Marianne D. McComb Biennial Conference on Creative Writing (Miami University), the Texas Library Association, the Nashville Book Festival, Decatur Book Festival, Thrillerfest, DragonCon, GenCon, Books by the Banks, Context, Scarefest, Conglomeration, Hypericon, Showmecon, Chattacon, SCBWI, the SOKY Book Festival, NKY YA Festival, Buckeye Book Festival, PennWriters, Marcon, and the Ohioana Festival.

“When I first started my writing career, other authors further along the path were always there to help guide me,” he said. “[I] could not have done this without them. It’s been a privilege to try and do the same for others.”

In 2013, Simon & Schuster published two Girard novels simultaneously—Cain’s Blood, a techno thriller, and Project Cain, a companion novel for teen/YA readers: the latter was nominated for a Bram Stoker award for Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel. In 2018, Girard was hired by Adaptive Studios to reimagine an unfinished Alfred Hitchcock project. The result was the novel Mary Rose, later optioned for film with a screenplay also by Girard. His young-adult thriller, Truthers, about 9/11 and conspiracy theories, received a starredreview from Publishers Weekly; School Library Journal called it “A beautifully written, captivating must-have that will hook readers from beginning to end.”

Mr. Girard also co-writes and ghostwrites memoirs and nonfiction (including at least one New York Times bestseller), media proposals for film and print, and op-eds for publications including the New York Post and FoxNews.com. He has written work-for-hire fiction, ranging from middle grade books to westerns, under various pen names. In 2019, he co-wrote African Samurai: The True Story of Yasuke, a Legendary Black Warrior in Feudal Japan, which was later optioned for film. He has written about everything from COVID and undercover police work to eighteenth-century botanists, the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, WikiLeaks, and the early history of personal computers. He’s been contracted to write and manage projects by globally recognized musicians, academics, journalists, political pundits, comedians and actors.

Before all that came business writing. “As an English lit major, I could [already] write better than most folks, because all we do is write essays, discuss language, and read the world’s greatest writers,” he said. “You learn to write well by reading a lot and writing—it’s pretty simple.” Straight out of college, Mr. Girard worked in advertising and public relations as a copywriter and manager: “I’d done a PR internship in college as a backup to my teaching plans and that career path opened up first, so I followed it.” For a decade, he wrote news releases, radio ads, sales sheets, direct mail, customer newsletters, and other material for the insurance, telecommunications, and software industries. “This, the business writing, is where I truly learned how to write—to be precise, clear, and persuasive. I could never have developed as a writer, or thinker, if I’d only written fiction.”

Later, shifting his attentions to a new invention called the internet—and picking up a degree in software development from the University of Cincinnati—he opened his own web company to write technical white papers and create, host,

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