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Silas House is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of nine novels, a book of creative nonfiction, and four plays. He is a two-time winner of the Southern Book Prize, a 2022 recipient of the Duggins Prize (the largest award for an LGBTQ writer in the nation), and an E.B. White Honor Award, the Booklist Editors’ Prize, the Storylines Prize from the New York Public Library/NAV Foundation, and many other honors, including an invitation to read at the Library of Congress and being longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. He served as the 2023-2025 Poet Laureate for the Commonwealth of Kentucky. House was a 2024 finalist for the Grammy Award, an MTV Music Video Award, a CMT Award, and an Academy of Country Music Award for writing, co-producing, and serving as the creative director of the music video for Tyler Childers’ “In Your Love”, the first video in country music history to feature a gay love story. The same year he served as a fiction judge for the National Book Awards. For his service to Appalachia he has received the Helen Lewis Service Award, the Lee Smith Award, and two Ally of the Year Awards from Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. In 2023 a nationwide poll by Appodolachia named him as the Appalachian of the Year.
House is a former commentator for NPR's "All Things Considered". His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Time, The Atlantic, The Bitter Southerner, The Advocate, Garden and Gun, and many other of the nation’s leading publications. As a music journalist House has worked with artists such as Kacey Musgraves, Tyler Childers, Kris Kristofferson, Lucinda Williams, Charley Crockett, Jason Isbell, Lee Ann Womack, Kenny Chesney, S.G. Goodman, and many others. He is an executive producer and one of the subjects of the award-winning 2018 film Hillbilly, which was purchased by Hulu.
House serves on the fiction faculty at the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Creative Writing and as the National Endowment for the Humanities Chair at Berea College, where he recently took over as editor in chief for The Appalachian Review, the region’s leading literary magazine. His new imprint at the University Press of Kentucky, Fox Hill Books, will publish four books a year that focus on the working class experience. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and is the recipient of four honorary doctorates. House is a proud native of Southeastern Kentucky and currently lives in Lexington, Kentucky. This fall will see the publication of his ninth novel, The Tulip Poplars, a century-spanning family saga about race, faith, and sexuality, and in 2027 he will publish his first picture book, That Dog Won’t Hunt, about a tenderhearted beagle, as well as the second entry in his mystery series.
Photo by Matt Johnson