FRANKFORT, Ky. (LEX 18) — Whitley County native and award-winning author Silas House has been named the 2023-24 Kentucky Poet Laureate.
Gov. Beshear made the announcement during the Kentucky Arts Council’s Kentucky Writers’ Day event Monday in the Capitol Rotunda in Frankfort.
House is a nationally bestselling author of the novels “Clay’s Quilt,” “A Parchment of Leaves,” “The Coal Tattoo,” and “Eli the Good.”
In 2012, he co-authored “Same Sun Here” with Neela Vaswani. House’s most recent novel, “Lark Ascending,” was published in 2022.
Other awards of his include the Nautilus Award, an E.B. White Award, Appalachian Book of the Year, the New York Public Library and NAV Foundation’s Storyline Prize and the Lee Smith Award.
House has been invited to read at the Library of Congress.
In 2018, his novel “Southernmost” was long listed for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. In 2020, House received the Governor’s Awards in the Arts Artist Award from Gov. Beshear.
“No wonder Kentucky has produced such a rich literary tradition – we are a complicated, complex people who have many different ways of being and thinking,” said House. “That diversity of thought is what makes us a commonwealth. My hope as poet laureate is to find more ways to unite us. Art brings us together in the same ways that food does, and in Kentucky, we appreciate good food and good art, whether it’s literature, music, paintings, dance and many other disciplines.”
Gov. Beshear said, “We are so proud of Silas, who grew up in Kentucky, was educated in Kentucky and now represents our state with such pride. Our commonwealth is fortunate to have him here teaching our future writers and now serving as our literary ambassador to the world.”
