Creative Writing Program | Reading Series

Reading Series, Spring 2007

JANISSE RAY, nonfiction writer, activist and naturalist

Writer, naturalist and activist Janisse Ray is author of three books of literary nonfiction. Ecology of a Cracker Childhood is a memoir about growing up on a junkyard in the ruined longleaf pine ecosystem of the Southeast. Besides being a plea to proetct and restore the glorious pine flatwood of the South, the book deals with such topics as mental illness, poverty, and fundamentalist religion. Ecology of a Cracker Childhood won the Southeastern Booksellers Award for Nonfiction 1999, a Before Columbus Society American Book Award 2000, the Southern Environmental Law Center 2000 Award for Outstanding Writing on the Southern Environment, and the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction 2000.
Ray's second book Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home, is about community, and her third book, Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land, is the story of a 750,000 acre wildland corridor between south Georgia and north Florida. Ray also co-edited Between Two Rivers: Stories from the Red Hills to the Gulf.
She has also published essays and poems in such periodicals as Audubon, Gray's Sporting Journal, Hope, Oprah Magazine, Natural History, Orion, Sierra, and The Washington Post. She has been anthologized in Where We Stand: Voices of Southern Dissent ; Elemental South: Earth, Air, Fire and Water; The Roadless Yaak; and The Norton Anthology of Nature Writing, among others.
She has been visiting professor at Coastal Carolina University, scholar-in-residence at Florida Gulf Coast University, and writer-in-residence at Keene State College and Green Moutain College, as well as the John and Renee Grisham writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi.
Ray currently lives in Brattleboro, Vermont, with her husband, Raven Burchard, and son, Silas, although a Georgia farm is her home. She lectures widely on topics regarding nature, community, sustainability and the politics of wholesomeness.

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