WEST LIBERTY, W.Va., January 23, 2024 — On Thursday, April 4, 2024, West Liberty University will welcome Silas House for the annual Hughes Lecture Series. The lecture is set to start at 4 p.m. in the Boyle Conference Room on the campus of West Liberty University and is free and open to the public.
House, traveling from Lexington, Kentucky, is the author of seven novels —“Clays Quilt,” “A Parchment of Leaves,” “The Coal Tattoo,” “Eli the Good,” “Same Sun Here,” (co-authored with Neela Vaswani), “Southernmost” and “Lark Ascending.” House also has a book of creative nonfiction — “Something’s Rising,” co-authored with Jason Howard, and three plays.
The Hughes Lecture Series is named after Dr. Raymond Hughes, a cherished professor of English at West Liberty University from 1931 to 1970.
“The Hughes Lecture strives to bring current and influential writers and artists to campus, and Silas House fits that description perfectly. I have been a long-time admirer of his work and have used his novels and short stories in several of my literature classes,” said Dr. W. Scott Hanna, who coordinates the Hughes Lecture and is an associate professor of English and creative writing coordinator in the College of Liberal and Creative Arts. “He is one of the leading voices in current Appalachian writing, and we are incredibly excited to have him on campus to work with our creative writing students and to give this year’s Hughes Lecture.”
He will visit with the Creative Writing: Fiction class and other English majors during the day and will deliver the Hughes Lecture at 4 p.m. in the Boyle Conference Center, located on the third floor in the Academic, Sports and Recreation Complex (ASRC). A reception and book signing will immediately follow. Books will be available for purchase at the event.
House has received many honors, such as the Storylines Prize from the New York Public Library/NAV Foundation, the Appalachian Book of the Year, EB White Honor Award, the Intellectual Freedom Prize, and countless others. His work has been published in several journals and anthologies, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Advocate, Time, and Oxford American.
In 2022, House was chosen for the Duggins Prize, the largest award for an LGBTQ+ writer in the nation. Most recently, House has been awarded the 2023 Southern Book Prize in Fiction for his 2022 novel, “Lark Ascending”.
House currently serves as the NEH Chair of Appalachian Studies at Berea College, on the fiction faculty at the Naslund-Mann School of Creative Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, and as a series editor for Fireside Industries at the University Press of Kentucky.
Dr. Raymond Hughes’s generous endowment gift established a fund for the series in 1978, and it has since brought over 100 authors and speakers to WLU, including Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate; Homer Hickam, West Virginia writer and NASA scientist; Jeannette Walls, author of “The Glass Castle” and Crystal Wilkinson, Kentucky Poet Laureate.
Copies of House’s books will be available in the Barnes and Noble campus bookstore in the coming weeks.
For more information on the Hughes Lecture, please contact wshanna@westliberty.edu.
West Liberty University is West Virginia’s oldest public university and offers more than 70 undergraduate majors and 12 graduate programs, both online and on campus. For more information, please visit westliberty.edu.