Writer, naturalist, and activist Janisse Ray grew up in a junkyard along U.S. Highway 1 in rural Georgia and developed a passion for saving the longleaf pine ecosystem. Ray will be at Lynchburg College April 21 to give a public lecture, "How Clear-Cut Does It Have To Be?" at 7:30 p.m. in the Memorial Ballroom, Hall Campus Center.
Ray's Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (Milkweed Editions, 1999) was selected as LC's 2007-08 freshman common reading in conjunction with LC's Year of the Environment: A Greener Tomorrow Today. Besides being a plea to protect and restore the pine flatwoods of the South, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood looks hard at family, mental illness, poverty, and fundamentalist religion.
The book won a Southeastern Booksellers Award 1999, an American Book Award 2000, the Southern Environmental Law Center 2000 Award for Outstanding Writing, and a Southern Book Critics Circle Award 2000. It was a New York Times Notable Book and was chosen as the Book All Georgians Should Read.
Ray is author of two other books of literary nonfiction. Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home, about rural community, was published by Milkweed Editions in early 2003. Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land, the story of a 750,000-acre wildland corridor between south Georgia and north Florida, was published by Chelsea Green in 2005.
Ray's essays appear in several anthologies and she has published in such periodicals as Audubon, Gray's Sporting Journal, Hope, Natural History, Oprah Magazine, Orion, Sierra and The Washington Post. She writes poetry and fiction as well as nonfiction, and has been a radio commentator for Vermont and Georgia public radio.
She holds an MFA from the University of Montana, and in 2007 was awarded an honorary doctorate from Unity College in Maine.
The author lectures widely on nature, community, organic agriculture, native plants, sustainability, and the politics of wholeness. As an organizer and activist, she works to create sustainable communities, local food systems, a stable global climate, intact ecosystems, clean rivers, life-enhancing economies, and participatory democracy.
Ray attempts to live a simple, sustainable life on a family farm in southern Georgia with her husband, Raven Waters. She has a college-age son, Silas. She is a gardener, tender of farm animals, hospice volunteer, slow-food cook, and a beginning filmmaker. She does yoga and trapeze, and is collaborating with aerialist Susan Murphy of Canopy Studio in Athens, Georgia on a spring 2008 show called "Water Body."