FYI - Janisse Ray participated in the Conference on Southern Literature
a few years ago . . . she was a great speaker & is a great writer - it
would be worth a trip to Dalton to hear her speak.

 

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Janisse Ray, writer, naturalist, and activist, will be the featured
speaker during the first Fine Arts and Lecture Series event sponsored by
Dalton State College this fall.

 

Ray, author of three books of literary nonfiction, will speak on Monday,
September 19 at 7:30 p.m., in the auditorium of Memorial Hall. The event
is free and open to the public.

 

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Ray's first book, is her memoir about
growing up on a junkyard in the ruined longleaf pine ecosystem of the
Southeast in rural Georgia. Besides being a plea to protect and restore
the pine flatwoods of the South, the book deals with such topics as
mental illness, poverty, and fundamentalist religion.

 

"When I wrote my first book, I didn't set out to write a memoir," Ray
said in a newspaper interview. "I just wanted to tell the story of this
endangered ecosystem, but I knew nobody would want to read a story about
a pine tree. I brought in parts of my own life because I felt like I had
an interesting enough story to tell."

 

Her first book won the Southeastern Booksellers Award for Nonfiction
1999, the Southern Environmental Law Center 2000 Award for Outstanding
Writing on Southern Environment, and the Southern Book Critics Circle
Award for Nonfiction 2000.

 

As an environmental activist, much of Ray's work focuses on providing
alternatives for industrial capitalism, slowing the rate of global
warming, working to decelerate fragmentation, and making logging in
global forests sustainable.

 

Her other books include Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home, about
rural community, and Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land,
which will be published this year.

 

Ray has been a writer-in-residence at The Island Institute, Florida Gulf
Coast University, and the University of Mississippi. She and her husband
Raven Burchard divide their time between Vermont and their family farm
in southern Georgia.

 

For more information about any of these events, please call 272-4469.