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Campus Review
November 13, 2013
Fall 2013 Visiting Writers Reading
Series to Feature Naturalist/Activist Janisse Ray
For the fall 2013
semester, the long-
running Clayton State
University Visiting
Writers
Reading
Series is trying some-
thing new… a one-
day event featuring
Naturalist and activist
Janisse Ray.
Ray will be visiting the Clayton State
campus on Thursday, Nov. 14, and will
make a lecture/presentation at 2:10 p.m.
in room UC 416 of the Baker Center and
a poetry reading at 5:30 p.m. in room UC
272 of the Baker Center. Both events are
free and open to the public.
Writer, naturalist and activist Ray is
author of four books of literary nonfiction
and a collection of nature poetry. She is on
the faculty of Chatham University’s low-
residency MFA program and is a Woodrow
Wilson Visiting Fellow. She holds an MFA
from the University of Montana, and in
2007 was awarded an honorary doctorate
from Unity College in Maine.
Ray is an activist whose most recent book
focuses on seeds. Her lecture is about pre-
serving seeds, and protecting seeds from
corporate food industry ownership and the
genetic manipulation ensuing.
“In my mind, this lecture would be of
interest to scientists as well as it would be
of interest to literature students, though
for different reasons,” says Associate
Professor of English Dr. Brigitte Byrd, the
founder and director of the Visiting
Writer’s Reading Series. “(Actually) this
lecture would be interesting to everyone
since food -- the product of seeds for us
and for industrial farming animals -- is
essential to health.”
Ray has won a Southern Booksellers
Award for Poetry 2011, Southeastern
Booksellers Award for Nonfiction 1999,
an American Book Award 2000, the
Southern Environmental Law Center
2000 Award for Outstanding Writing, and
a Southern Book Critics Circle Award
2000. Her “Ecology of a Cracker
Childhood” was a New York Times
Notable Book and was chosen as the
Book All Georgians Should Read.
Ray attempts to live a simple, sustainable
life on a farm in southern Georgia with
her husband, Raven Waters. Ray is an
organic gardener, seedsaver, tender of
farm animals, and slow-food cook. She
lectures widely on nature, community,
agriculture, wildness, sustainability and
the politics of wholeness.
Career Services Senior Day fall 2013
Janisse Ray