Janisse Ray, writer, naturalist, and activist, will be the featured speaker during the first Fine Arts and Lecture Series event sponsored by Dalton State College this fall.

Ray, author of three books of literary nonfiction, will speak on Monday, September 19, in the auditorium of Memorial Hall. The event is free and open to the public.

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Ray’s first book, is her memoir about growing up on a junkyard in the ruined longleaf pine ecosystem of the Southeast in rural Georgia. Besides being a plea to protect and restore the pine flatwoods of the South, the book deals with such topics as mental illness, poverty, and fundamentalist religion.

“When I wrote my first book, I didn’t set out to write a memoir,” Ray said in a newspaper interview. “I just wanted to tell the story of this endangered ecosystem, but I knew nobody would want to read a story about a pine tree. I brought in parts of my own life because I felt like I had an interesting enough story to tell.”

Her first book won the Southeastern Booksellers Award for Nonfiction 1999, the Southern Environmental Law Center 2000 Award for Outstanding Writing on Southern Environment, and the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction 2000.

As an environmental activist, much of Ray’s work focuses on providing alternatives for industrial capitalism, slowing the rate of global warming, working to decelerate fragmentation, and making logging in global forests sustainable.

Her other books include Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home, about rural community, and Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land, which will be published this year.

Ray has been a writer-in-residence at The Island Institute, Florida Gulf Coast University, and the University of Mississippi. She and her husband Raven Burchard divide their time between Vermont and their family farm in southern Georgia.

For more information about any of these events, please call 272-4469.