Silas House discusses All These Ghosts with Kathleen Driskell

This is a ticketed event and each ticket includes a hardcover copy of All These Ghosts.

About the Book:

A timely and poignant poetry collection by acclaimed author and former Poet Laureate of Kentucky Silas House, including the poem read at Governor Andy Beshear's 2023 inauguration and an interview by Barbara Kingsolver.

Silas House is known throughout the South as a quintessential person of letters--a novelist, music journalist, environmental activist, columnist, and the former Poet Laureate of Kentucky. His first full-length collection of poetry blends his Appalachian upbringing with his ongoing relation to the natural world. Poems of praise for community and the collective appear alongside others tinged with nostalgia and grief when House keenly observes the loss of rural America as he once knew it. Returning to his touchstone subjects, Silas recalls wild places, echoes stories from a lingering and living past, and explores an abiding connection to family, friends, and fellow artists.

About the Authors:

Silas House is the New York Times bestselling author of seven novels, a book of creative nonfiction, and four plays. His first picture book will be published in 2025. His latest novel, Lark Ascending, was a USA Today and indie bestseller, a Booklist Editor’s Choice, and is winner of the Southern Book Prize and the Nautilus Award. In 2025 he releases two books: All These Ghosts, a poetry collection, and Dead Man Blues, a mystery under the pseudonym of S.D. House. He served as the Kentucky Poet Laureate for 2023-2025.

House was a 2024 finalist for the Grammy Award for writing and producing the music video for Tyler Childers’ “In Your Love”, and is the winner of an EB White Honor Award, the Appalachian Book of the Year, the Storylines Prize from the New York Public Library/NAV Foundation, two Nautilus Awards, and many other honors, including an invitation to read at the Library of Congress and being longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and shortlisted for the Willie Morris Award. In 2022 he was given the Duggins Prize, the largest award in the nation for an LGBTQ writer. In 2024 he served as a fiction judge for the National Book Awards.

House serves on the fiction faculty at the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Creative Writing and as the National Endowment for the Humanities Chair at Berea College. He is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and is the recipient of four honorary doctorates. House is a native of Southeastern Kentucky and currently lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

Award-winning poet, essayist, and teacher Kathleen Driskell has authored of six poetry collections, most recently Goat-Footed Gods (Carnegie Mellon UP). Other collections include Blue Etiquette: Poems, a finalist for the Weatherford Award; Next Door to the Dead, winner of the Judy Gaines Young Book Award; and Seed Across Snow, a Poetry Foundation national bestseller. Her individual poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Rattle, River Teeth, Appalachian Review, The Southern Review, Shenandoah and other magazines; and her work has been featured in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and American Life in Poetry. From 2019-22, she served as chair of the board of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, the professional organization of creative writers and creative writing programs with around 75,000 members. She is professor of creative writing and Chair of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, where she lives with her husband in an old country church built before the American Civil War. On April 24, 2025, Governor Andy Beshear appointed Kathleen as the 2025-26 Kentucky Poet Laureate.

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