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Photo by Cheyenne House

(Article from Wikipedia) Silas House (born 1971) is an American writer best known for his novels. He is also a music journalist, environmental activist, and columnist. House’s fiction is known for its attention to the natural world, working class characters, and the plight of the rural place and rural people.

House was born and grew up in rural Lily, Laurel County, Kentucky. He has degrees from Sue Bennett College and Eastern Kentucky University.

House’s first novel, Clay’s Quilt, was published in 2001. It appeared briefly on the New York Times Best Seller list and became a word-of-mouth success throughout the South. It was a finalist for both the Southeast Booksellers Association fiction award and the Appalachian Writers’ Association Book of the Year Award. He followed with A Parchment of Leaves (2003), which became a national bestseller and was nominated for several major awards. The book was a finalist for the Southern Book Critics Circle Prize and won the Award for Special Achievement from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Chaffin Award for Literature, the Kentucky Novel of the Year Award, and many others.

House’s next book, The Coal Tattoo (2004), was a finalist for the Southern Book Critics Circle Prize as well as winning the Appalachian Writers’ Association Book of the Year Award, the Kentucky Novel of the Year Award, and others. House’s work has been championed by such acclaimed writers as Lee Smith and Larry Brown, who both served as mentors for House.

House’s writing has appeared in Oxford American, Newsday, Bayou, The Louisville Review, Night Train, Appalachian Heritage, and others. His work has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and anthologized in such books as New Stories From the South: The Year’s Best, 2004 and many others. He has also written the introductions to Missing Mountains, a study of mountaintop removal; From Walton’s Mountain to Tomorrow, a biography of Earl Hamner, Jr., and Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses, a new edition by HarperCollins.

House is also a music journalist who serves as a contributing editor to No Depression magazine, for which he has written features on Lucinda Williams, Delbert McClinton, and many others. In 2001 and 2002 he was a regular contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered. In 2005 House wrote the play The Hurting Part, which was produced by the University of Kentucky.

Lately House has become increasingly visible in the fight against mountaintop removal mining, an environmentally devastating form of coal mining that blasts the entire top off a mountain and fills the valley below with the debris. House wrote the original draft of the 2005 Kentucky authors’ statement against the mining practice; since the draft more than three dozen authors have signed it. House has published many articles about mountaintop removal as well as performing at various concerts as a member of Public Outcry, an acoustic band formed for the purpose of raising awareness about mountaintop removal mining. The other members of the group are authors George Ella Lyon and Anne Shelby, and musicians Jason Howard, Jessie Lynne Keltner, and Kate Larken. Public Outcry tours college campuses to educate students about mountaintop removal. House and Howard also perform together as The Doolittles.

House has completed a fourth novel, Eli the Good, which will be published in 2008. He has also recently finished editing the posthumous manuscript of poet and novelist James Still, one of House’s literary idols. House is currently at work on his fifth novel and a play. He recently co-wrote a screenplay for actress Ashley Judd that has not yet been produced. House serves as writer-in-residence at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee, where he also directs the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival. House still resides in Lily, where he lives with his wife and two daughters.