Vertical Align

I’m trying to get vertical align to work.

I was reading over this post; https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/valign-and-other-table-formatting and following that but it didn’t seem to work.

I added;

td.spotlight { vertical-align: middle; }

to my CSS sheet.

Then here is my code in my table;

<table align="center">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td rowspan="2"><img class="wp-image-473 aligncenter" src="https://www.happy-ever-after.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/test2-150x150.png" alt="" width="134" height="200" /></td>
<td rowspan="2" width="100"></td>
<td class="spotlight">
<h5 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: TheChickenloveStory">Author Name</span></h5>
</td>
</tr>
<tr valign="top">
<td>author biography</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="3">[spacer height=15px]</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="3">book list</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

The part of the table, the TD, that I wanted to align middle, I put the class=spotlight but that like it said I should in that post I linked above but it didn’t seem to work.

https://www.happy-ever-after.org/wordpress/wp-content/themes/HappyEverAfter/cap.png

Above is the screencap of what it looks like. The author name long should be in the middle of the picture to the left, not at the top, but isn’t.

Help?