The Drum

Janisse Ray is an American writer whose subject is often nature. She is author of five books of literary nonfiction as well as a volume of eco-poetry. Her books have won many awards and been translated into other languages. She holds an MFA from the University of Montana, where she was the William Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer 2014. That year Ray was awarded an honorary doctorate from LaGrange College in Georgia, following one from Unity College in Maine in 2007. She won the 2017 Southern Environmental Law Center Award in journalism for a piece on coal ash that published in The Bitter Southerner. She is a 2015 inductee into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. In 2018 she was the Louis D. Rubin Jr. Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University in Roanoke, Va. Ray was born in southern Georgia, where she returned to live, on an organic farm near the confluence of the Altamaha and Ohoopee rivers.

Her essay "Cheyenne" appears in the Spring 2019 issue of The Drum.