Award-winning poet and fiction writer, Silas House will receive the Appalachian Heritage Writer's Award and serve as 2009 Writer-in-Residence at Shepherd University. House will participate in a variety of programs and events from September 28 through October 4, 2009, associated with WIR events and the Appalachian Heritage Festival and Concert. Author of Clay's Quilt, The Coal Tattoo, A Parchment of Leaves, and Eli the Good, House's fiction has received both regional and national recognition.

Silas House is a native of Kentucky, who still lives and writes in his boyhood town of Lyly, Kentucky. His poetry, plays, and fiction have been touted as products of a remarkable and profound new talent in Appalachia. He was listed as one of "Ten Emerging Talents in the South" by the Millennial Gathering of Writers at Vanderbilt University in 2000. Mentored by Lee Smith, House has written stories that have appeared in Oxford American, Appalachian Heritage, The Louisville Review, and an array of journals and magazines. His novels have received two Pushcart Prize nominations, and A Parchment of Leaves won both the prestigious Chaffin Award for Literature and the Kentucky Novel of the Year Award.

House will serve throughout 2009 with the Appalachian Heritage Writers' Project, selecting the winners of the WV fiction competition Awards and serving as Senior Advisor to the Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Volume II.

About the Program
The Appalachian Heritage Writer's Award and Appalachian Heritage Writer-in-Residence Project were developed by the Department of English at Shepherd University in 1998 to celebrate and honor the work of a distinguished contemporary Appalachian writer. The literary residency was designed to function in concert with the Appalachian Heritage Festival, an annual celebration of Appalachian artistic and cultural traditions, sponsored by the Performing Arts Series at Shepherd (PASS).

To encourage aspiring West Virginia writers and to promote the kind of networking that fosters literary achievement, Shepherd University developed, in fall 2001, the West Virginia Fiction Competition. Fiction submissions from across the state of West Virginia are judged by a panel of teachers and writers, with final selection of the winning works of fiction made by the Appalachian Heritage Writer-in-Residence. The first-prize winner of the fiction competition will receive a cash prize of $500.

The Anthology of Appalachian Writers is a publication that encourages a long-established tradition of storytelling, love of language, and creative expression associated broadly with the area of the country known as Appalachia. Though the principal mission of the anthology is to provide a venue for publication of new writers, it also provides a collection of literature and scholarship that contributes to an understanding and appreciation for the region. Poetry, fiction, memoir, heritage writers, as well as new voices appear in each annual volume of the anthology.