Author and Environmentalist Janisse Ray
7:00 p.m., Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Greenfelder-Denlinger Boardroom
Student Community Center
Our mid-winter speaker grew up in rural southern Georgia, earned her bachelor's degree from Florida State University, and established herself as a leading environmental writer with the 1999 publication of a memoir, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. Since then, Janisse Ray has advocated for sustainability as an activist, an organizer, and as a writer and teacher. Her works include fiction and poetry, as well as literary nonfiction. In a passage from her book Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land, the author and speaker describes a turning point in her life. "Life was good in my little hand-built cabin at the edge of a remnant Appalachian ravine, where in the pasture I grew persimmons and pears and tended a sprawling garden, and where I could live off the grid, free of consumer guilt. If I wanted to make a difference, however, if I wanted to inspire and educate others to honor wildness, I would have to venture forth into the world." The author's appearance in the speaker series coincides with a longer visit to Saint Leo through the Council of Independent Colleges Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellows program.
The Saint Leo University Speaker Series brings distinguished experts from a wide range of disciplines face-to-face with members of the university community. These influential doers and thinkers present relevant, provocative topics that generate discussion among students, faculty, alumni, and the surrounding community—dialogue that is central to the university's mission.