Janisse Ray
is an award-winning and beloved American writer of nonfiction and poetry. Her book WILD SPECTACLE was chosen by Pam Houston for the Donald L. Jordan Prize in Literary Excellence, which carries a 10K award. Ray won a Pushcart Prize in 2020 for her essay "The Lonely Ruralist," published in GEORGIA REVIEW.
Ray has been inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame and was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Georgia Writer's Association.
Her first book, ECOLOGY OF A CRACKER CHILDHOOD, recounts her experiences growing up in a junkyard, the daughter of a poor, white, fundamentalist Christian family. The book interweaves family history and memoir with natural history writing—specifically, descriptions of the ecology of the vanishing longleaf pine forests that once blanketed the Southern coastal plains. The book won an American Book Award, Southern Book Critics Circle Award, and 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 recounts her experiences of moving back home to Georgia. Her third book, PINHOOK, tells the story of Pinhook Swamp, the land that connects the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia and Osceola National Forest in Florida.
DRIFTING INTO DARIEN, published in 2011, describes her experiences on and knowledge about the mighty Altamaha River, which runs from middle Georgia to the Atlantic Ocean at Darien.
Ray's poetry collections are A HOUSE OF BRANCHES and RED LANTERNS. She has contributed to THE BITTER SOUTHERNER, GRAVY, ORION, and many other magazines.
Ray earned an MFA from the University of Montana. She is the daughter of the late Franklin D. and Lee Ada Branch Ray of Baxley, Georgia. She has a son, Silas Ausable, and a daughter, Skye Larkin, and is married to painter Raven Zapatismo Waters.
She lives and works in Georgia.
“I think of my own life, how it embraces a great quest to know every cog of nature--the names of oaks and ferns, the secret lives of birds, the taste of venison and Ogeechee lime, wax myrtle's smell and rattlesnake's, the contour of bobcat tracks, the number of barred owl cackles, the feel of Okefenokee Swamp water on my skin under a blistering sun.I search for a vital knowledge of the land that my father could not teach me, as he was not taught, and guidance to know and honor it, as he was not guided, as if this will shield me from the errancies of the mind, or bring me back from that dark territory should I happen to wander there. I search as if there were peace to be found.”
“Turning back to embrace the past has been a long, slow lesson not only in self-esteem, but in patriotism—pride in homeland, heritage. It has taken a decade to whip the shame, to mispronounce words and shun grammar when mispronunciation and misspeaking are part of my dialect, to own the bad blood. What I come from has made me who I am.”
“Rural places have hemorrhaged their best and brightest children, their intellectuals, thinkers, organizers, leaders, and artists-those who would create change and who would parent another generation of thinkers. All gone.Our seeds are disappearing.”
“Of what use to humanity, I ask myself, is a man who cannot see beyond his own hurt?”
“I carry the landscape inside me like an ache. The story of who I am cannot be severed from the story of the flatwoods.”