Silas House named 2023-24 Kentucky Poet Laureate
FRANKFORT, Ky. (WTVQ) — Silas House, an award-winning author and Whitley County native, was appointed as the 2023-24 Kentucky Poet Laureate by Gov. Andy Beshear on Monday.
The announcement was part of the Kentucky Arts Council’s Kentucky Writers’ Day event hosted in the Capitol Rotunda.
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. His most recent novel, Lark Ascending, was published in 2022.
Over his career, he’s won a multitude of awards, like 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. He has been invited to read at the Library of Congress.
“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 at the ceremony. “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.”
Kentucky Writers’ Day is an annual celebration on or about April 24, which is the birthday of Kentucky writer Robert Penn Warren, the first United States Poet Laureate. The Writers’ Day celebration was established in 1990, and poets laureate are inducted in odd-numbered years.
