Goucher College’s 2009 Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow: Janisse Ray

Release date: March 05, 2009 |

Writer, naturalist, and environmental activist Janisse Ray will present a free public reading from her award-winning memoir Ecology of a Cracker Childhood on Thursday, March 5, at 7:30 p.m. in Buchner Hall of Goucher College’s Alumnae/i House. Ray will be appearing as Goucher’s 2009 Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow.

Wilson Fellows connect a liberal arts education with the world beyond the campus by bringing thoughtful and successful practitioners to college campuses for a week of classes and informal discussions with students and faculty. In addition to her public lecture, Ray will be meeting with environmental studies students and faculty and co-curricular groups, as well as student writers.

Ray is the author of three books of literary nonfiction. Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, a memoir about growing up in a junkyard in rural southern Georgia, was published in 1999. Besides being a plea to protect and restore the pine fatwoods of the South, the book critically addresses the issues of family, mental illness, poverty, and fundamentalist religion.

The book won the American Book Award, the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, and the Southern Environmental Law Center Award for Outstanding Writing on the Southern environment. It was also chosen for the “All Georgia Reading the Same Book” project by the Georgia Center for the Book.

Ray’s second book, Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home (2003), recounts her experiences of moving back home to Georgia with her son after attending graduate school in Montana. Her third book, Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land (2005), 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 in 2004 and has written for Audubon, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Hope, Natural History, Oprah Magazine, Orion, Sierra, and The Washington Post.

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 Mountain College. She was the John and Renee Grisham writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi. She earned an MFA from the University of Montana, and in 2007, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Unity College in Maine.

Ray lives in Brattleboro, VT, with her husband and son. She works as an activist to re-create sustainable communities, local food systems, a restabilized global climate, intact ecosystems, clean rivers, life-enhancing economies, and participatory democracy. She lectures widely on nature, community, and sustainability.