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CCC&TI Watauga Campus to Welcome N.C. Novelist Silas House for Writers Symposium, March 8

Press Release from: Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute

March 5, 2012. Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute will host Appalachian author Silas House for the 2012 Laurette LePrevost Writers Symposium. House is the author of four novels, two plays and a non-fiction book.

The college will host a reading and question-and-answer session with House on Thursday, March 8 at 12 p.m. on the Watauga Campus. Later that evening, House will hold a reading/question-and-answer session at CCC&TI’s Caldwell Campus Gym at 7 p.m. for students and the community. On Friday, March 9, House will read in the Caldwell Campus gym at 12 p.m. 

All events are free and open to the public.

The symposium, entitled “Piecing Together the Past,” coincides with students’ study of House’s novels Eli the Good and Clay’s Quilt in their English and Reading courses.

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). He also has authored two plays, The Hurting Part (2005) and Long Time Travelling (2009). In addition, House co-authored with Jason Howard Something’s Rising (2009), a creative nonfiction book about social protest.  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 artist 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. In 2009 the Silas House Literary Seminar was given at Emory and Henry College. For his environmental activism House received the Helen Lewis Community Service Award in 2008 from the Appalachian Studies Association. In 2010 he was awarded the Intellectual Freedom Award from the Kentucky Council of English Teachers. House’s work can be found in The New York Times, 2, 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. He divides his time between London and Berea.

This year’s event is the 24th Annual Laurette LePrevost Writers Symposium. Laurette LePrevost, former Dean of Arts and Sciences for CCC&TI, was instrumental in building the Writers Symposium into an annual event that has brought in such renowned writers as Maya Angelou, Ernest Gaines, Nikki Giovanni, Robert Morgan and Clyde Edgerton. Under her leadership and guidance, CCC&TI’s symposium became the longest-running consecutively held writers symposium in western North Carolina and one of the longest in the Southeast. The writers symposium series was renamed in her honor when she retired in 2004.  

Support for the Laurette LePrevost Writers Symposium is provided by the Foundation of Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute.  For more information on CCC&TI’s  Laurette LePrevost Writers Symposium, call 726-2200.