GRAMMY Nominee and Best-Selling Author Silas House Inspires Owensboro Crowd

"Build bigger tables, not walls."- Silas House

The Greater Owensboro Chamber of Commerce held its monthly Rooster Booster breakfast this morning at the Owensboro Convention Center and the program featured a very special featured speaker. GRAMMY nominee, New York Times best-selling author, and current Kentucky Poet Laureate Silas House inspired the crowd with a powerful message titled "Knowledge Builds Community."

House's literary credentials are impressive. A month ago, when the Chamber revealed that Silas would be the guest speaker for May's program, his impressive career was celebrated in this video announcement.

This morning at breakfast, Silas lived up to the billing and shared his incredibly personal story about how books and libraries changed his life and shaped the person, the artist he is today.

Owensboro resident Jennifer Vogel was thrilled with the opportunity to hear from Silas House. She was at the Owensboro Convention Center at 7am "like an absolute psychopath." Her dedication paid off. Like many fans in the crowd, she got the chance to meet Silas and get a photo with him.

Silas specifically discussed life as a 7th grader growing up in eastern Kentucky. At the age of 12, he knew he "was different from the other 12-year-old boys." They all loved basketball. He loved books. It was that love of books and learning that initially led him to buy books from various yard sales around his community. He read The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, books by Stephen King, and The Exorcist (which remains an inspiration for his writings today because of its intense exploration of faith and doubt). Silas quickly found out, however, that those yard sales all seemed to have the same books and he was craving to read and learn more. So, he eventually found a whole new world of wonder in the school library.

There, he discovered one book in particular- The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. It was in the pages of that book that Silas, in many ways, found himself. In his 'fundamentalist' small town, he was an outsider. He was different and related to Hinton's characters, who were also trying to find their own way into a community of belonging.

Jennifer Francis-Gehring, who laid claim to a front row seat at today's breakfast, shared this.

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