Janisse Ray

Georgia Writers Museum will welcome Georgia Writers Hall of Fame honoree Janisse Ray as the “Meet the Author” presenter on Tuesday, June 4, at the Plaza Arts Center at 7p.m. (doors open at 6:30p.m). The event will feature amazing sweets from the wild and décor themed around the book. After her presentation, Ray will sign copies of her book. Admission is $20.

Email the Georgia Writers Museum (www.georgiawritersmuseum.org) to register and preorder a copy of “The Woods of Fannin County.” Here is a bit about the book’s backstory.

In the fall of 1945, eight children—brothers and sisters ranging in age from three months to ten years—vanished from a rented bungalow in Morganton, Georgia. They were taken by mule and wagon to a remote shack in the Blue Ridge foothills of Fannin County, near the North Carolina line. For the next four years they would live mostly alone, without mother or father, roaming the mountains and valleys of what had been Cherokee Territory, scouring for food and scrambling to take care of themselves and each other.

“I first heard about the story from my father,” said Ray in a recent interview with AJC. “He introduced me to one of the surviving siblings. I would eventually interview three other siblings and the wife of another. While the story is completely true, its central character—who died before I heard about the story—is a mixture of the siblings I interviewed.”

Ray, a naturalist and ecology activist, is the author of a half dozen books, including the widely acclaimed “Ecology of a Cracker Childhood,”“Wild Spectacle,”“Wild Card Quilt,” and “The Woods of Fannin County.” Her newest book, “Craft and Current, A Manual for Magical Writing,” will be released this summer.

Ray received an American Book Award, a Southern Book Critics Circle Award, a Southern Booksellers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Green Prize for Sustainable Literature, a Nautilus Book Award, an Arlene Eisenberg Award, and many others. She holds an MFA from the University of Montana, and has been awarded two honorary doctorates. In 2015, Ray was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, and in 2019 she won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Georgia Writers Association.

The Georgia Writers Museum is located at 109 S. Jefferson Avenue, Eatonton. For more information call 706-991-5119.