Table Of Content
House is known for his novels but he has published poetry. And the genre “has really always sustained me,” House said, comparing the form to music and song. House has often written about climate change, too, and advocated for protecting natural resources. (He’s also never been able to kill a spider since reading that book).
Books In Order
As a little boy, I often went to Corbin’s small but active downtown with my mother and aunt. We ate chili buns at the Dixie Café, and my aunt gave me quarters for the jukebox with instructions to play Bob Seger songs. Rebecca Gayle Howellis a 2019 United States Artists Fellow. Her most recent book is American Purgatory, selected by DonShare for Great Britain’s Sexton Prize and named a must-read collection by Poetry London, The Millions, and the Courier-Journal. She serves as thepoetry editor for Oxford American andthe James Still Writer-in-Residence at the Hindman Settlement School in KnottCounty, Kentucky. Southernmost is a meditation on love and its consequences in a quickly changing America.
Personal life
Louisville Public Media depends on donations from members – generous people like you – for the majority of our funding. You can help make the next story possible with a donation of $10 or $20. We'll put your gift to work providing news and music for our diverse community. That’s the premise of “Lark Ascending,” the latest novel from Kentucky writer Silas House. “I have … a two-year window where I can do a lot of things to help, especially young writers,” House said.
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“This is probably the gayborhood of Berea,” grins Silas House, pointing to the Pride flags billowing from front porches on a tiny street in this small Kentucky college town. Eli the Good is about freedom and the responsibility of having freedom. When I write a book I have that theme above my writing table.
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Andy Beshear's gubernatorial inauguration is Tuesday in Frankfort; here's the schedule - NKyTribune.
Posted: Sun, 10 Dec 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]
So I think literature helps us to be better people because ultimately every story is about good versus evil. I know that it's important especially for young queer people to see me in the public. I'm just happy to be out there as an openly gay person and to be visible and to show people that there is no monolithic gay person.
It’s always there, I’m always looking at it and every sentence has to report back to that. Near the end of my carrying the mail I delivered a parcel to a woman on my route and she happened to be at the mailbox and she said “That’s your book. Open it and sign it for me.” So that’s full circle from writing it on the mail route to actually signing it at the mailbox. In a one-mile stretch lived several cousins with more family two counties away and frequent visiting. My cousins watched wrestling while I liked Tennessee Williams. This shift is most visible at the Wrigley Taproom & Eatery, in the same building where my mother and aunt used to go dress shopping.
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
In that moment, he also began to think about grieving other losses, particularly the heavy sadness that comes from the impacts of climate change and threats to democracy. House is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and a former commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered. He is the executive producer and one of the subjects of the documentary Hillbilly, winner of the L.A. Film Festival’s Documentary Prize and the Foreign Press Association’s Media Award. His novel Southernmost is currently in pre-production as a feature film. House teaches at Berea College, where he is the National Endowment for the Humanities Chair, and at the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing.
Early life and education
And while House has lost readers because of his sexuality, he says more often people will write and say they’re not going to purchase his work anymore because he’s liberal. I am terrified at the rise of Christian Nationalism because I have experienced it up close and personal. In high school, after a fist fight where I was forced to defend myself after a boy punched me in the mouth “for being a faggot” he defended himself to the principal by citing Scripture. If Christian Nationalists gain control we will be a nation run by people who apply their judgement to others even while they give themselves passes to participate in many of the archaic rules found there. It will be a country where women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and people of other faiths will be stripped of their rights in laws justified by scripture. He usually spends most of his days working at a coal mine and many of his weekends getting drunk with friends.
Silas’s Bookshelves
House also teaches creative fiction at Bera College and the Spalding School of Creative Writing. Today, Corbin is better known for its vibrant downtown scene than the travesty that happened there almost a century ago. But an unexpected thing happened on the way to obsolescence. In the early 2000s, city officials legalized alcohol at restaurants and set out to attract small businesses to the faded downtown. Corbin is home to the first Kentucky Fried Chicken, so they built a park featuring a large statue of Colonel Sanders. The town also wanted to overcome the spirit of the 1919 riot; in 2005, the United Methodist Church there made a concerted effort to welcome African Americans displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
House’s work has been published in TIME Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and others. House serves as the National Endowment for the Humanities Chair at Berea College and on the fiction faculty at the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing. One of the first works of literature House can remember reading was “Charlotte’s Web” by E. Much like his fascination with “The Waltons” on television, he saw parts of his family life represented on the page.
And despite some hate mail, he’s received plenty of letters that read, “Thank you for being a gay person who has a public persona—there are so few Kentuckians like that.” This inspires him to be open about his sexuality while on his book tours. I’ve had two books that sort of wrote themselves and both of those books were the ones that won the most awards for me. I think sometimes the more organic a book is the more acclaimed it becomes. The less an author is visible in it the more able readers are to connect to it.
Other notable writers of our time have called Kentucky home – bell hooks, Barbara Kingsolver, Wendell Berry and more. Kentucky’s poet laureate, whose job is to elevate the literary arts in the state, need not be a poet. His uncles, grandfather and brother-in-law worked in coal mines. His coal mining grandfather lost a leg in the mines, House said, and suffered from black lung, which is lung scarring from coal dust inhalation.
House and Vaswani recorded the highly successful audiobook version of the novel, which won an Earphones Award, and the Audie Award for Best Narration for Children's Title Ages 8–12,[8] the highest honor given to audiobooks. The novel won over a dozen awards, including the Nautilus Award and a South Asian Book Association Honor Book. He got involved in activism at the invitation of his friend Wendell Berry, who is a public intellectual, author, and environmentalist.
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