Janisse Ray

Janisse Ray

Writer, naturalist, and activist Janisse Ray is the author of six books, including the widely acclaimed memoirs Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and Wild Card Quilt. Her work has been widely taught and anthologized, and has received an American Book Award, a Southern Book Critics Circle Award, a Southern Booksellers Award, and many others. She holds an MFA from the University of Montana and has been awarded two honorary doctorates, one from Unity College in Maine and the other from LaGrange College in Georgia. In 2015, Ray was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. She lives in rural southern Georgia and continues to teach and lecture widely.

Awards
American Book Award
Southern Booksellers Award
Southern Environmental Law Center Award for Outstanding Writing
Southern Book Critics Circle Award
Nautilus Book Award
American Horticultural Society Book Award
American Society of Journalists & Authors (ASJA) Arlene Eisenberg Award for Writing that Makes a Difference
Bloomsbury Review Editors' Favorite Books
Mirriam Frontier Award
Garden Writers Association Gold Award of Achievement
Green Prize for Sustainable Literature Award
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Books by Janisse Ray

Nonfiction

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

By
Janisse Ray

This contemporary classic has inspired thousands to embrace their beginnings, no matter how humble, and to fight for the places they love. In language at once colloquial, elegiac, and informative, this memoir catalogues a people and their home—a junkyard in the south, and the forests surrounding it.

Wild Card Quilt
Nonfiction

Wild Card Quilt

The Ecology of Home
By
Janisse Ray

In these short pieces—sometimes hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking—the author chronicles her return to a hometown in need of repair, physical and otherwise, after seventeen years away. Syrup boils, alligator trapping, and fighting to save the town’s school: this book crafts a compelling argument for the possibilities of rural community.

Related Media

Watch: Selection from Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray | YouTube
Watch: Interview with Janisse Ray | Georgia Writers Hall of Fame 2015
Watch: Conversations around the Green Fire: Janisse Ray | Center for Humans and Nature
Watch: This I Believe- Janisse Ray | Warren Wilson ELC

Author Q & A

  • Question

    In the “about the author” in your book Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, it says that you “left your home of Baxley, GA to go to college and did not return for several years.” What kept you away? What brought you back?

    Lane Emmons, The Echo
    Answer

    I was away for 17 years, if I’m counting correctly. I never intended to go back. But the more I read about “place” and “sense of place,” and the more I thought about it, the more I began to enjoy the idea of returning. If all the best & brightest young people leave a place, what kind of doom does it spell for it? The diaspora of our young artists & thinkers leave behind a kind of cultural poverty in rural America, one that matches the economic poverty. I guess you can say I never really got south Georgia out of my bones, & finally I realized that, and I went home. No place I’ve ever lived really felt like home to me.

  • Question

    What is your writing practice? When you sit down to write, what does it look like?

    Lane Emmons, The Echo
    Answer

    Early morning, a small, warm, & wood-filled office. A desk in a corner. Staring at the wall. Sheets of action verbs on the wall in front of me. Sometimes a sheet of paper & sometimes a computer. Two hours ahead of me. Or, it looks like me & my journal, hanging out in the hammock on the side porch, where our old dog is sleeping. Watching titmice in the crepe myrtle, crows crossing the pastures. Watching the cows graze. Trying to say what needs to be said.

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