Author very social media savvy; janisseray.com,
facebook.com/janisse.ray, Insta & Twitter @tracklesswild
Regional and national media
Advertising and presenting with Southern Indie Booksellers
Alliance
professional assocations Georgia Writers Hall of Fame and Georgia
Writers Museum (Eatonton, Ga)
Author broadly published in places like Oprah Magazine, Sierra,
Washington Post, Audubon, National Geographic Traveler, Ecotone,
Terrain, Orion, Southern Foodways Alliance, Bitter Southerner,
Heartsone, etc.
Janisse Ray is a naturalist and activist, and the author of seven books of nonfiction and poetry, including The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food, Drifting into Darien: A Personal and Natural History of the Altamaha River, and Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, which won the American Book Award. Her work has appeared widely in magazines and journals, and she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Nautilus Book Award, and numerous other honors. Ray lives on an organic farm near Savannah, Georgia.
Praise for Wild Spectacle
Georgia Center for the Book “Books All Georgians Should Read” for
2022
Atlanta Journal Constitution Top 10 Southern Books of 2021
Gun & Garden’s Favorite Books of 2021
“A lover takes nothing for granted. A lover explores,
wanders, takes delight in nuance. Says, viva la difference. A lover
listens, savors, is patient. Janisse Ray is a writer in love with
place and places.” — Orion
“With its combination of lyrical sentences, heartfelt truths,
and profound observations, this book is a gem and a worthy sequel
to Cracker Childhood.” — Southern Literary Review
“Ray is more than a knowledgeable observer. Her relationship
with the natural world is passionate and spiritual.” — Alabama
Public Radio
“The essays in Wild Spectacle span 20 years…they show that no
matter where or when we are, there’s wonders to bear witness to.” —
Savannah Morning News
“Just a small town girl traveling the whole world, Janisse
Ray’s new collection Wild Spectacle showcases her choice to take on
heart-pounding adventure while discovering herself and nature.”
— Connect Savannah
“Naturalist Janisse Ray’s clear, nimble, sensitive writing about
wildness and self-discovery is so arresting that it has informed my
own writing.” — Latria Graham, Garden & Gun
“Wild Spectacle is prayer to Mother Earth, and like prayers
Ray both exalts and grieves Her. This book will surely mark your
soul.” — Dawn Major"An enthralling immersion into the splendor of
our natural world told in language that is equal parts rapturous
and down to earth." — The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"An enchanting essay collection about the wonders and lessons that
nature provides." — Foreword Reviews
“Wild Spectacle is prayer to Mother Earth, and like prayers Ray
both exalts and grieves Her. This book will surely mark your soul.”
— Dawn Major
“Think about epiphany. Think about change. Think about the moments
that make your face burn, your fingers tingle. Wild Spectacle is
about those shocks, encounters that shift the way we see the world
and ourselves in it. Ray is the vortex around which everything
spins.” — Joni Tevis, author of The World Is on Fire: Scrap,
Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse
“Wonderful. Janisse Ray has a heart the size of a manatee and the
tenacity (and laugh) of a pileated woodpecker. She is incapable of
not loving this world and all that is in it. If you don’t yet know
her work, today is your lucky day.” — Rick Bass, author of For a
Little While: New and Selected Stories
”Curious, humble, bright, and compelling. Whenever I read Janisse
Ray, I come away feeling both moved and fortunate. She is one of
America’s best chroniclers of spiritual and physical wilderness.
Her prose is as gorgeous as her mind is wise, and lands a necessary
punch: how should a human enter a wild place?” — Megan Mayhew
Bergman, author of Almost Famous Women
“These seductive and diverse essays evoke wildness themselves,
weaving narratives of community, love, and heroism. Ray writes with
the heart of a poet and warrior, casting a spell that leaves us
wanting to love and protect all that is wild. She urges us to
remember what beauty there is in the world, and how much that world
needs us.” — Sheryl St. Germain, author of Fifty Miles
“Ray’s richness of observation, clarity of expression, and moral
purpose are in such balance that this book hums like a gyroscope in
your hands. Read and reread it again to savor the scenes and
sentences.” — Melissa Fay Greene, author of No Biking in the House
without a Helmet: 9 Kids, 3 Continents, 2 Parents, 1 Family
“An urgent love letter to our wild places. Part poet, naturalist,
and tour guide, Ray is a gifted observer. We finish this remarkable
book brimming with gratitude and alive to the wild spectacles
around us.” — Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating and Cooling: 52
Micro-Memoirs
“Here is Janisse Ray at her best—fully immersed in wilderness,
immersed in friendship, immersed in parenthood. She engages with
the world in a way that few can manage in this screened-off age. If
there’s a more open, honest, and appealing writer today, I’ve not
met her.” — Bill McKibben, author Wandering Home: A Long Walk
across America’s Most Hopeful Landscape
“Wild Spectacle is a stirring book. To experience the truth of
Thoreau’s claim that wildness preserves the world, take these
journeys with Janisse Ray. She is an exhilarating observer who
explores untamed places where that shaping, animating energy is on
vivid display.” — Scott Russell Sanders, author of The Way of
Imagination
“Janisse Ray’s sense of wonder in the presence of the natural world
permeates this collection of essays on how to love the Earth and
measure the value of a life surrounded by the mother we all share.
These essays help us measure the value of life.” — Pam Houston,
author of Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country
"Seriously great. In its brilliantly detailed celebrations of
geography, Janisse Ray's writing suggests Walt Whitman. Hers is a
literary ambition that makes no pretenses to modesty." — Franklin
Burroughs, author of Billy Watson’s Croker Sack
"Janisse Ray doesn’t explore nature so much as remind us of what we
have forgotten... She is our Rachel Carson and our Walt Whitman,
both fierce prophet and loving courage teacher." — Mark Powell,
author Lioness
Praise for Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
"Painfully and powerfully told.... Ray's passion for preserving and
restoring this unsung landscape is heartfelt and refreshing." —
Tony Horowitz, New York Times
"The forests of the southeast find their Rachel Carson . . . . In
Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, part memoir, part clarion call to
save the longleaf pine, she casts a loving but unflinching eye on
growing up poor and fundamentalist in southeast Georgia.” — Anne
Raver, New York Times
"A gutsy, wholly original memoir of ragged grace and raw
beauty...Ray’s redemptive story of an impoverished childhood brings
to mind the novels of Dorothy Allison and the nature writing of Amy
Blackmarr, but the stunning voice and vision are hers alone." —
Kirkus Reviews (STARRED)
"Ray's writing is at its best when she recalls her most harrowing
memories, such as when her father gave her and her two brothers a
whipping after they stood by and watched a friend kill a turtle.
These scenes resonate during the interpolated naturalist chapters,
which evoke the calm of the landscape and give readers a respite
from the anger and pain that drive much of the family narrative. In
a final chapter (in which she includes appendixes on the specific
endangered species of the South), Ray laments the 'daily erosion of
unique folkways as our native ecosystems and all their inhabitants
disappear.' What remains most memorable are the sections where Ray
describes, and attempts to prevent, her own disconnection from the
Georgia landscape." — Publishers Weekly
"Ray’s paean to the filth, rot, shit, and rust of her childhood on
a Georgia junkyard. Half memoir, half polemic, Cracker Childhood is
both a recollection of how Ray came to understand the natural
world’s value and beauty, and an impassioned explanation of why the
longleaf pine ecosystems of southeast Georgia, Alabama, and Florida
must be defended against any further assault by humanity." —
Grist
Praise for Wild Card Quilt
"Ray celebrates the richness of the natural world and the comforts
of family. — Publishers Weekly
Praise for Pinhook
"Her moving book is a tribute to a small but crucial wild place and
a call for readers to help preserve it and others like it." —
Publishers WeeklyPraise for The Seed Underground
"An enchanting narrative...Even couch potatoes will be enthralled
by Ray’s intimate, poetically conversational stories of her
encounters with the 'lovely, whimsical, and soulful things [that]
happen in a garden, leaving a gardener giddy.'"— Publishers Weekly
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