Award-winning author, naturalist, and activist Janisse Ray will give a talk on the UTC campus about heirloom seeds, agrodiversity and the future of food. The event is scheduled for Thursday, July 24 at 7:00 p.m. in the Raccoon Mountain Room of the UTC University Center.
This program is presented by the Tennessee Valley chapter of Wild Ones and UTC Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences. Registration is $5 for Wild Ones members and $15 for the general public. Attendees can register here.
Ray is the author of five books of literary nonfiction, including her first, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. The work is a memoir about growing up on a junkyard in the ruined longleaf pine ecosystem of south Georgia, and takes a hard look at family, mental illness, poverty and fundamentalism. The author advocates for the protection and restoration of the pine flatwoods of the South.
The book earned Ray the Southeastern Booksellers Award for Nonfiction, an American Book Award, the Southern Environmental Law Center Award for Outstanding Writing and a Southern Book Critics Circle Award.
Her latest book, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food, is a look at heirloom seeds and the future of food. Ray attempts to live a simple, sustainable life on an organic farm in southern Georgia with her husband, Raven Waters and their daughter.