Silas House
A native of Lily, Kentucky, where his family has lived for generations, Silas House earned undergraduate degrees from Sue Bennett College and Eastern Kentucky University and an M.F.A. from Spalding University. He is the author of three novels: Clay's Quilt (2001), A Parchment of Leaves (2002), and The Coal Tattoo (2004), the last of which was named Book of the Year by the Appalachian Writers Association.
House is also a playwright, having published The Hurting Part (first performed in 2005) and having had a second play, A Long Time Traveling, produced in 2009. His most recent book is Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (2009), which he co-authored with Jason Howard. A frequent contributor to both National Public Radio and the music magazine No Depression, House has been widely recognized as a major new voice in Appalachian and Southern literature. In 2003 he received the James Still Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers for his writing on the mountain South.
Currently he is writer-in-residence at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee. Eli the Good, his first novel for young adults, will be published in September of this year.
Books By Silas House
- Clay's Quilt
- A Parchment of Leaves
- The Coal Tattoo
- Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal
Plays
- The Hurting Part
- A Long Time Traveling
Events
Emory & Henry's 28th annual Literary Festival is scheduled for Thursday-Friday, October 29-30, 2009. Events begin at 2:30 Oct. 29 with papers on House's fiction by Maurice Manning and Chad Berry. That evening at 7:30 House will read from his work. On Oct. 30 Marianne Worthington will present a third paper at 2:30, followed by a public interview with House conducted by novelist Pamela Duncan.
All these events are free and open to the public. They will be held in the Board of Visitors Lounge in the Van Dyke Center on the College's campus.
About the Festival
The Emory & Henry Literary Festival began in 1982 with a program devoted to Sherwood Anderson, who spent the final 15 years of his life in nearby Smyth County, Virginia. Since that inaugural occasion the festival has honored a living writer with strong ties to the Appalachian region, an author who comes to campus for a reading and a public interview and who listens to two or three papers about her/his work.
The proceedings of each festival, along with some new writing by the featured author, are published in an annual issue of the College's Iron Mountain Review. Eight of the essays from these festivals were reprinted in An American Vein: Critical Readings in Appalachian Literature (2005). The interviews conducted at the festivals from 1983 to 2003 have been reprinted by the University of Tennessee Press in Appalachia and Beyond: Conversations with Writers from the Mountain South (2006).
Iron Mountain Review
Editor's Note from the 25th Anniversary Issue
The 2006 Literary Festival marked the twenty-fifth such event sponsored by Emory & Henry College. The proceedings of each festival have been published in an issue of The Iron Mountain Review, starting with the Sherwood Anderson issue in the spring of 1983. That issue is now unavailable, but limited quantities of each of the others remain. They include issues on James Still, Fred Chappell, Lee Smith, John Ehle, Jim Wayne Miller, Wilma Dykeman, Robert Morgan, Mary Lee Settle, Charles Wright, David Huddle, George Ella Lyon, Jeff Daniel Marion, Meredith Sue Willis, Gurney Norman, Jo Carson, Denise Giardina, George Scarbrough, Lisa Alther, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Michael McFee, Ron Rash, Maggie Anderson, Sharyn McCrumb, and Michael Chitwood, together with special numbers on the Holston River and on the poetry and artwork of Michael Martin.
Back issues of IMR may be ordered from the editor at a cost of $5 each, which includes the price of postage. Checks should be made payable to The Iron Mountain Review. For more information write Dr. John Lang, PO Box 64, Emory, VA 24327 or email jlang@ehc.edu
Table of contents for the 25th Anniversary issue.
Contact
John Lang, Department of English
Emory & Henry College
PO Box 947
Emory, VA 24327-0947
276.944.6143
jlang@ehc.edu
