Silas House
Silas House is the nationally bestselling author of six novels—Clay's Quilt, 2001; A Parchment of Leaves, 2003; The Coal Tattoo, 2005; Eli the Good, 2009; and Same Sun Here (co-authored with Neela Vaswani) 2012, and Southernmost (June 2018)—as well as a book of creative nonfiction—Something's Rising, co-authored with Jason Howard, 2009; and three plays: The Hurting Part(2005), This Is My Heart for You (2012), and In These Fields, with Sam Gleaves, 2016.
House serves as the NEH Chair of Appalachian Literature at Berea College and on the fiction faculty at Spalding University’s MFA in Creative Writing program. House is a former commentator for NPR's "All Things Considered" and 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 the winner of the E. B. White Award, the Audie Award (best narration), the Nautilus Award, 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, recipient of the Lee Smith Award, the Hobson Medal for Literature, the Appalachian Book of the Year, the Chaffin Prize for Literature, the Award for Special Achievement from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, The Parents' Choice Award, 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. In 2020, Silas was the recipient of the Artist Award from Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear as part of the annual Governor’s Award in the Arts, the most prestigious arts award in the state.
House’s work can be found in The New York Times, Newsday, Oxford American, Bayou, The Southeast Review, The Louisville Review, The Beloit Fiction Journal, Wind, Night Train, and others, as well as in the anthologies The Southern Poetry Anthology: Volume 3, New Stories From the South 2004: The Year’s Best, Christmas in the South, A Kentucky Reader, Of Woods and Water, Motif, We All Live Downstream, Missing Mountains, A Kentucky Christmas, Shouts and Whispers, High Horse, The Alumni Grill, Stories From the Blue Moon Café I and II, and many others.
House was born and raised in Eastern Kentucky. He is the father of two daughters and has three dogs: Rufus, Holly, and Pepper. He divides his time between London and Berea, Kentucky.