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Got this message below from our friends at the Richland County Public Library and wanted to share it with Jasper's readers. This truly is an exciting week for the literary arts in Columbia! Silas House on Tuesday and Ron Rash on Wednesday -- both at our downtown library. Not bad. Not bad at all.
Read about Silas House and the Southern Writers Series below. Read about Ron Rash here and here.
Southern Writers Series Returns to RCPL in 2012
Join the Friends of the Richland County Public Library and the University of South Carolina Institute for Southern Studies for a book discussion and signing by Silas House, the first of four events in the 2012 Southern Writers Series that features several of the South’s best authors, at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, January 31 at the Main Library, 1431 Assembly St.
Silas House is the award-winning author of four previous novels, two plays, and a book of creative nonfiction. His fifth novel, a young adult novel entitled Same Sun Here and co-written with Neela Vaswani, will be published in early 2012. A teacher and environmental activist as well as an author and editor, House is the creator of the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival and directs the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center at Berea College.
Ten Things You May Not Know About Silas House
- Silas House is the author of four novels: Clay’s Quilt (2001), A Parchment of Leaves (2003), The Coal Tattoo (2004), Eli the Good (2009), two plays, The Hurting Part (2005) and Long Time Travelling (2009), and Something’s Rising (2009), a creative nonfiction book about social protest co-authored with Jason Howard.
- House was selected to edit the posthumous manuscript of acclaimed writer James Still, Chinaberry.
- House’s young adult novel, Same Sun Here, co-written with Neela Vaswani, will be published by Candlewick Books in early 2012.
- House serves as the Director of the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center at Berea College and on the fiction faculty at Spalding University’s MFA in Creative Writing program.
- House is 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 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, the Lee Smith Award, 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.
- For his environmental activism House received the Helen Lewis Community Service Award in 2008 from the Appalachian Studies Association.
- 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 is the father of two daughters.
(10 Things courtesy of the Silas House website at http://silashouse.weebly.com/index.html.)