Best-selling Kentucky author Silas House addresses Appalachian issues in a presentation at Berea College April 15

Silas House, a four-time best-selling author and Kentucky native will speak at Berea College on Thursday, April 15, beginning at 3 p.m. in Phelps Stokes Auditorium. His presentation “Hope, Home and Help” will include the issues of Appalachian pride, the exciting prospect of change in our region and nation, and the way that helping one’s self allows us to help others, challenging us to put aside apathy and do good works.

Free and open to the public, the event is co-sponsored by Berea College Convocations and the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center.

House’s writings include: Clay’s Quilt (2001), A Parchment of Leaves (2003), The Coal Tattoo (2004), a play, The Hurting Part (2005), Something’s Rising (2009), a creative nonfiction book about social protest co-authored with Jason Howard, and his fourth novel, Eli the Good, published in Fall 2009. A new play, Long Time Traveling premiered in April 2009. House is currently working on his fifth novel, Evona Darling.

House serves as Writer-in-Residence at Lincoln Memorial University, where he also directs the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival. He is a contributing editor for No Depression magazine, where he has done long features on such artists as Lucinda Williams, Nickel Creek, Buddy Miller, Kelly Willis, Darrell Scott, Delbert McClinton, 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 many others.

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 Book of the Year, the Chaffin Prize for Literature, the Award for Special Achievement from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and many other honors. Recently House was personally selected by the subject to write the foreword for the biography of Earl Hamner, creator of The Waltons. In 2005 he also wrote the introduction for the new HarperCollins edition of Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses.

For his environmental activism House received the Helen Lewis Community Lewis Award in 2008 from the Appalachian Studies Association.
House’s presentation is the 2010 Appalachian Lecture for Berea College. Admission is free and open to the public