Silas House is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of nine novels, a book of creative nonfiction, and four plays. He is a two-time winner of the Southern Book Prize, a 2022 recipient of the Duggins Prize (the largest award for an LGBTQ writer in the nation), and an E.B. White Honor Award, the Booklist Editors’ Prize, the Storylines Prize from the New York Public Library/NAV Foundation, 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. He served as the 2023-2025 Poet Laureate for the Commonwealth of Kentucky. House was a 2024 finalist for the Grammy Award, an MTV Music Video Award, a CMT Award, and an Academy of Country Music Award for writing, co-producing, and serving as the creative director of the music video for Tyler Childers’ “In Your Love”, the first video in country music history to feature a gay love story. The same year he served as a fiction judge for the National Book Awards. For his service to Appalachia he has received the Helen Lewis Service Award, the Lee Smith Award, and two Ally of the Year Awards from Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. In 2023 a nationwide poll by Appodolachia named him as the Appalachian of the Year. 
 
House is a former commentator for NPR's "All Things Considered". His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Time, The Atlantic, The Bitter Southerner, The Advocate, Garden and Gun, and many other of the nation’s leading publications. As a music journalist House has worked with artists such as Kacey Musgraves, Tyler Childers, Kris Kristofferson, Lucinda Williams, Charley Crockett, Jason Isbell, Lee Ann Womack, Kenny Chesney, S.G. Goodman, and many others. He is an executive producer and one of the subjects of the award-winning 2018 film Hillbilly, which was purchased by Hulu. 
 
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, where he recently took over as editor in chief for The Appalachian Review, the region’s leading literary magazine. His new imprint at the University Press of Kentucky, Fox Hill Books, will publish four books a year that focus on the working class experience. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and is the recipient of four honorary doctorates. House is a proud native of Southeastern Kentucky and currently lives in Lexington, Kentucky. This fall will see the publication of his ninth novel, The Tulip Poplars, a century-spanning family saga about race, faith, and sexuality, and in 2027 he will publish his first picture book, That Dog Won’t Hunt, about a tenderhearted beagle, as well as the second entry in his mystery series.

Gill Holland owns The Group Entertainment LLC, which includes a film production company, talent management division, a music company and an art gallery. Holland has produced more than 70 feature films including Hurricane Streets which was the first film ever to win three Sundance Film Festival awards in 1997 as well as the Cannes Film Festival selection Inside/Out, the Independent Spirit Awards winner Sweet Land and nominee Dear Jesse (also nominated for an Emmy), the Gotham Awards nominee Spring Forward and FLOW: For Love of Water which was short-listed for an Academy Award.

Ashley York is a director and producer who is interested in documentaries, cinematic journalism, and media for social change and justice. She has worked on Academy Award® winning teams and as a producer on projects that have premiered at the Sundance, Berlin, and SXSW film festivals as well as on Netflix, HBO, National Geographic, Oprah Winfrey’s Network, A&E, IFC, Discovery, and the Sundance Channel.

She co-directed and produced the Netflix Original Documentary Tig, an Official Selection of the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, the International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam, the Istanbul Independent Documentary Festival, and Outfest. Her most recent film won the Best Documentary Award at the 2018 Los Angeles Film Festival and a Founders Award at the Traverse City Film Festival. Ashley was one of nine women debuting a feature film at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival and was featured in Variety as a filmmaker to watch.

Ashley is committed to a feminist approach and intrigued by work that intersects the emotional and ideological. She is inspired greatly by the works of bell hooks, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, the late Aimé J. Ellis, and Silas House. 

She has collaborated with award-winning documentary filmmakers, including Rashida Jones, Amy Ziering, Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato, Judith Helfand, Billy Luther, and Kirby Dick. She worked as a field director on the 2017 Sundance Film Festival Official Selection Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On and produced two 2011 Sundance Film Festival Official selections: Becoming Chaz, about Chaz Bono’s gender transition; and GRAB, about the Laguna Pueblo tribe in New Mexico. She is a frequent panelist and artist in residence for Women in Film, SXSW Interactive,the International Documentary Association, and MASS MoCA.

She is a member of Film Fatales, Women in Film, the International Documentary Association, Film Independent, the Appalachian Studies Association, and a founding member of the Los Angeles-based design collective, Take Action Games, which has been recognized for its commitment to highlighting issues that affect women and girls and partnered with various social justice and mission-based organizations in the making of digital activist projects, including the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, the International Crisis Group, the Independent Television Service, and the Center for Asian American Media. Take Action Games received an Emmy Award nomination in the category of New Approaches to News and Documentary Film as well as the prestigious Governors' Award from the Academy of Arts & Sciences (the Emmy's highest honor) in recognition of a campaign co-produced by mtvU to raise awareness about the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of the Sudan.

Ashley was born in Kentucky and attended the University of Kentucky where she received a BA in journalism. She received her MFA from the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts where she teaches in the Division of Media Arts + Practice.
​Ashley lives in Los Angeles.