Marilyn Kallet and Janisse Ray

The Looking Class Rock Writers’ Conference presents authors Marilyn Kallet & Janisse Ray. Program starts at 7:30 pm in the Rogow Room at the Library. This event is made possible by the Transylvania County Library Foundation and Brevard College.  Highland Books will have books for sale and signing following the program and there will be a dessert reception in the Library following the program.  
Marilyn Kallet was born in Montgomery, Alabama, and grew up in New York; this tension between North and South is one of the themes in her poetry.   Her degrees are from Tufts, the Sorbonne, and Rutgers (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature.) Kallet has published sixteen books, including six volumes of poetry, translations, critical essays, children’s books, pedagogy, and anthologies of women’s literature.   In addition to teaching at the University of Tennessee, she teaches a poetry workshop for the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts at their site in Auvillar, France.  Among other honors, she has won the Tennessee Arts Commission Literary Fellowship in poetry, and was inducted into the East Tennessee Literary Hall of Fame in poetry, 2005; the Knoxville YWCA named her Woman of Achievement in the Arts, 2000; she was awarded an Honorary Woodrow Wilson Fellowship.  Kallet has performed her poetry on campuses and in theaters across the United States, in France and in Warsaw and Krakow, as a guest of the U.S. Embassy’s “America Presents” cultural arts program.  More at http://marilynkallet.com/

Janisse Ray (born 1962) is an American writer, naturalist and environmental activist. She was born on February 2 in Baxley, Georgia and attended North Georgia College, 1980–82; Florida State University, BA, 1984, and the University of Montana, MFA, 1997.Her first book, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, recounts her experiences growing up in a junkyard, the daughter of a poor, white, fundamentalist Christian family. The book interweaves family history and memoir with natural history writing—specifically, descriptions of the ecology of the vanishing longleaf pine forests that once blanketed much of the South. The book won the American Book Award, the Southern Book Critics Circle Award and the Southern Environmental Law Center Award for Outstanding Writing on the Southern environment. It also was chosen for the “All Georgia Reading the Same Book” project by the Georgia Center for the Book.Ray’s second book, Wild Card Quilt, recounts her experiences of moving back home to Georgia with her son after attending graduate school in Montana. Her third book, Pinhook, tells the story of Pinhook Swamp, the land that connects the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia and Osceola National Forest in Florida. Her fourth book, Drifting into Darien, published in 2011, describes her experiences on and knowledge about the Altamaha River, which runs from middle Georgia to the Atlantic Ocean at Darien. Ray published a book of poetry, A House of Branches, in 2010, and has been a contributor to Audubon, Orion and other magazines, as well as a commentator for NPR’s Living on Earth. An environmental activist, she has campaigned on behalf of the Altamaha River and the Moody Swamp. She teaches in the Chatham University Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing.  More at https://janisseray.weebly.com/