Silas House in conversation with Jayne Waldrop discussing and signing Clay's Quilt

Silas House in conversation with Jayne Waldrop discussing and signing Clay’s Quilt

Thursday, September 30, 2021 - 7:00pm - 8:00pm EST

LOCATION: Joseph-Beth Lexington

Join us for Silas House in conversation with Jayne Waldrop discussing, signing, and celebrating the 20^th anniversary of Clay’s Quilt.

In his New York Times bestselling debut novel, Silas House introduced himself as an important voice for Appalachia, and indeed, for the entire rural South. In Clay's Quilt, now a touchstone for his many fans, House takes us to Free Creek, Kentucky, where a motherless young man forges his path to adulthood, surrounded by ancient mountains and his blood relatives and adopted kin: his Aunt Easter tied to her faith and foreboding nature; his Uncle Paul, the quilter; the wild girls Evangeline and Alma; and a fiddler whose music calls to Clay's heart. As he struggles to stitch up the void created by his mother's death, Clay pieces together his own life's quilt, all masterfully wrought by House.

Blair brings this novel into a beautiful new paperback edition, along with two other Silas House novels, A Parchment of Leaves and The Coal Tattoo. The three novels, which share a common setting and some characters, are companion novels. They may be read individually, in any order, but collectively, they form a rich tableau of life in rural mountain Kentucky in the last century.

Silas House is the New York Times bestselling author of six novels, one book of creative nonfiction, and three plays. He is a frequent contributor to The Atlantic, his writing has appeared many times in the New York Times and has been published recently in Time, Ecotone, Garden and Gun, Oxford American, and many other places. House is the winner of an E.B. White Award, the Nautilus Award, the Intellectual Freedom Prize from the National Council of Teachers of English, the Storylines Prize from the New York Public Library/NAV Foundation, and many other honors, as well as being long listed for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. He teaches at Berea College and in the Spalding University School of Writing.

Jayne Moore Waldrop, a western Kentucky native, is the author of Retracing My Steps, a finalist in the 2018 New Women's Voices Chapbook Contest, and Pandemic Lent: A Season in Poems. Waldrop's work has appeared in the Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Still: The Journal, Appalachian Review, New Madrid Review, Deep South Magazine, New Limestone Review, Women Speak, and other literary journals. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky. Waldrop's new book, Drowned Town, was edited by Silas House and will be published October 26 this year.