Author, Environmental Activist to Speak at Ferrum
as Part of Lecture Series on Sustainability
October 22, 2009
nfaunce@ferrum.edu
Author, poet and environmental activist Janisse Ray continues Ferrum College’s Sustainability Lecture Series on Oct. 29.
Ray will share how her experiences growing up in rural Georgia led to a passion for longleaf pine forests and a career in environmental activism. Her upbringing influenced her first book, the award-winning Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, a literary non-fiction examining how a dying ecosystem can negatively affect a rural community.
Her unique and inspiring work became an instant success, winning the Southeastern Booksellers Award for Nonfiction in 1999 and the Southern Environmental Law Center Award for Outstanding Writing on the Southern Environment, the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, and the American Book Award in 2000. Ray also is the author of Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home and Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land. Pinhook chronicles the restoration of Pinhook Swamp of south Georgia. Through the efforts of Ray and other environmentalists, the swamp is now a protected wildlife corridor.
Ray has published many poems and essays in such magazines and newspapers as Georgia Wildlife, National Geographic Wildlife and Orion. A nature commentator for Georgia Public Radio and a founding board member of Altamaha Riverkeeper, Ray also helped to form the Georgia Nature-Based Tourism Association and continues working to preserve the 3,400-acre Moody Forest.
The lecture, sponsored by Ferrum’s School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, is free and open to the public. It begins at 7 p.m. on Oct. 29 in the Blue Ridge Mountain Room in Franklin Hall. While on campus, Ray will teach writing workshops for Ferrum students.