Silas House




Silas House is the author of four novels:  Clay’s Quilt (2001), A Parchment of Leaves (2003), The Coal Tattoo (2004), Eli the Good (2009), two plays, The Hurting Part (2005) and Long Time Travelling (2009), and Something’s Rising (2009), a creative nonfiction book about social protest co-authored with Jason Howard.  House was selected to edit the posthumous manuscript of acclaimed writer James StillChinaberry.  House’s young adult novel, Same Sun Here, co-written with Neela Vaswani, will be published by Candlewick Books in early 2012.

House serves as the NEH Chair in Appalachian Studies at Berea College and on the fiction faculty at Spalding University’s MFA in Creative Writing program.  House is a former contributing editor for No Depression magazine, where he has done long features on such artists as Lucinda Williams, Nickel Creek, and many others.  He is also one of Nashville’s most in-demand press kit writers, having written the press kit bios for such artists as Kris Kristofferson, Kathy Mattea, Leann Womack, and others. A former writer-in-residence at Lincoln Memorial University, he is the creator of the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival.

House is a two-time finalist for the Southern Book Critics Circle Prize, a two-time winner of the Kentucky Novel of the Year, the Appalachian Writer of the Year, the Lee Smith Award, the Appalachian Book of the Year, the Chaffin Prize for Literature, the Award for Special Achievement from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and many other honors. In 2009 the Silas House Literary Seminar was given at Emory and Henry College.  For his environmental activism House received the Helen Lewis Community Service Award in 2008 from the Appalachian Studies Association.  In 2010 he was awarded the Intellectual Freedom Award from the Kentucky Council of English Teachers.

House’s work can be found in The New York TimesNewsdayOxford American, BayouThe Southeast Review,The Louisville ReviewThe Beloit Fiction JournalWindNight Train, and others, as well as in the anthologies The Southern Poetry Anthology:  Volume 3, New Stories From the South 2004:  The Year’s BestChristmas in the SouthA Kentucky ReaderOf Woods and WaterMotif, We All Live Downstream, Missing MountainsA Kentucky ChristmasShouts and WhispersHigh HorseThe Alumni GrillStories From the Blue Moon Café I and II, and many others.

House is the father of two daughters.  He divides his time between London and Berea, Kentucky.

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