In order to prime and prepare ourselves for this conference, we have put together a pre-reading guide that includes some of our favorite authors who will be at the conference, including their anticipated topics of discussion.
LITERATURE
SILAS HOUSE
Silas House is the New York Times bestselling author of seven novels, including his most recent, Lark Ascending, which was a Booklist Editors’ Choice and is the winner of the 2023 Southern Book Prize and the 2023 Nautilus Book Award. Four of his plays have been produced. He is also the author of the 2009 book of creative nonfiction Something’s Rising (with co-author Jason Kyle Howard).
His writing has appeared recently in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Time, Garden & Gun, The New York Times, Oxford American, Ecotone, Tri-Quarterly, and many more of the country’s leading publications. House is a former commentator for NPR’s “All Things Considered” and is the executive producer and one of the subjects of the documentary Hillbilly, winner of the LA Film Festival’s Documentary Prize and the Foreign Press Association’s Media Award. His 2018 novel Southernmost is currently in pre-production as a feature film.
As a music journalist, House has worked with Jason Isbell, Kacey Musgraves, Lucinda Williams, Tyler Childers, S.G. Goodman, Lee Ann Womack, Kris Kristofferson, Señora May, and many other musicians.
He is the member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the recipient of three honorary degrees, and has been given such honors as an E. B. White Award, the Storylines Prize from the New York Public Library/NAV Foundation, the Lee Smith Award, the Caritas Medal, the Hobson Medal, and many others. In 2022 he was the recipient of the Duggins Prize, the largest award for an LGBTQ writer in the nation. The same year he was named Appalachian of the Year in a nationwide poll. In 2023 he was inducted as the Poet Laureate of Kentucky for 2023-2025.
House teaches at Berea College, where he is the National Endowment for the Humanities Chair, and at the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Creative Writing. A native of Eastern Kentucky, he now lives in Lexington, Kentucky.
At FFW2024:
House will discuss the importance and meaning of family, biological and chosen, and how family experiences can impact faith and doubt.
WATCH a conversation with Silas House about his novel Lark Ascending.
Recommended FFW Pre-Reading:
Southernmost: A Novel
MITALI PERKINS
Mitali Perkins served as Calvin University’s inaugural Distinguished Writer-in-Residence in 2023. She has written many books for young readers, including Between Us and Abuela (2020 Charlotte Huck Honor Book, Winner of the Américas Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature); Forward Me Back To You (SLJ and Kirkus Best YA Books of 2019); You Bring the Distant Near (nominated for a National Book Award, six starred reviews); and Rickshaw Girl (adapted into a film by Sleeperwave Productions). All of these narratives explore crossing different kinds of borders. Indeed, Perkins’ fiction explores topics like poverty, immigration, child soldiers, microcredit, and human trafficking. Her range of subjects owes much to her living overseas for many years, as well as to studying Political Science at Stanford and Public Policy at UC Berkeley. Her goal in fiction is to make readers laugh or cry, preferably both, as long as their hearts are widening. She lives and writes in the East Bay.
At FFW2024:
In her session with Jennifer DeLeon, Perkins will discuss ways to write and collect stories for young people.
READ our Feature Review of Steeped in Stories
Recommended FFW Pre-Reading:
Steeped in Stories:
Timeless Children’s Novels to Refresh Our Tired Souls
CHRISTIAN WIMAN
Christian Wiman is the Clement-Muehl Professor of Communication Arts at Yale Divinity School. He has written a dozen books and edited several others, including My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer and Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair. Raised in west Texas, he has traveled widely and worked at several different institutions, including the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, where for a decade he was editor of Poetry. He lives in New Haven, CT with his wife, Danielle Chapman, and their twin daughters.
At FFW2024:
Wiman will discuss modern poems and how they can help people live and look to God.
READ our Feature Review of Zero at the Bone
Recommended FFW Pre-Reading:
Zero at the Bone:
Fifty Entries Against Despair
DIANE GLANCY
Diane Glancy is professor emerita at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. For the past five years she taught in the low-residency MFA program at Carlow University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She also teaches a cohort on experimental writing at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.
Glancy’s latest books, Island of the Innocent: A Consideration of the Book of Job, and A Line of Driftwood: The Ada Blackjack Story, were published by Turtle Point Press in 2020 and 2021. A book of nonfiction, Home Is the Road: Wandering the Land, Shaping the Spirit, was published in 2022 by Broadleaf Books, Fortress Press. In 2023, Turtle Point published Psalm to Whom(e), and Jawbone, a poetry collection, won the Fort Worth Chapbook competition. Forthcoming in 2024 is Quadrille: Christianity and the Early New England Indians, written during a fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society.
Among her awards are two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, an American Book Award, a Minnesota Book Award, an Oklahoma Book Award, a Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. Glancy lives in north central Texas where many tribes camped, Apache, Comanche, Wichita, Waco, Kiowa. Their silenced voices are part of her work. Her other books and awards are on her website, www.dianeglancy.com.
At FFW2024:
Glancy will talk about marginalized voices – and how much of her work seeks to give voice to those who have been forgotten or overlooked.
READ our Feature Review of Home is the Road
Recommended FFW Pre-Reading: Home is the Road:
Wandering the Land, Shaping the Spirit
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C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is also author of a number of books, including most recently How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church (Brazos Press, 2019). Connect with him online at: C-Christopher-Smith.com
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