Coming from Mercer University Press in Fall 2010
Two New Books on William Bartram
More than two centuries have passed since the publication of William Bartram’s "Travels" in 1791, and his text continues to ignite the imagination of southerners who love nature. Mercer University Press is pleased to announce these forthcoming titles.
"The Flower Seeker" is an epic poem that follows the young William Bartram on his journey in the American South and during his old age in his father's gardens. It is truly a southern Odyssey, using techniques of fiction and poetry to get deeply inside one of the most remarkable men ever to strap on a pair of boots in America. Philip Lee Williams is the author of 14 published books and has written about the natural world most of his career and taught nature writing at the University of Georgia.
"Bartram’s Living Legacy: the Travels and the Nature of the South" reprints Bartram’s classic work alongside essays acknowledging the debt southern nature writers owe the man called the “South’s Thoreau.” The anthology includes contributions from sixteen of the South’s finest nature writers, strikingly illustrated with Bartram-inspired landscape paintings by Philip Juras.
Contributing Authors
Bill Belleville is an award-winning environmental journalist, writer, and filmmaker. In River of Lakes: A Journey on Florida's St. Johns River (2001), Belleville describes his journey down the length of the St. Johns, kayaking, boating, hiking its riverbanks, diving in its springs, and exploring its underwater caves. He rediscovers the natural Florida and establishes his connection with a place once loved for its untamed beauty. River of Lakes weaves together the biological, cultural, anthropological, archaeological, and ecological aspects of the St. Johns, capturing the essence of its remarkable history and intrinsic value as a natural wonder.
Kathryn E. Holland Braund holds the Ph.D. degree in history from Florida State University. She is the author of Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America (1993; 2nd ed., 2008) and co-author, with Gregory A. Waselkov of William Bartram on the Southeastern Indians (2002). Braund is the immediate past-president of the Bartram Trail Conference, a national organization of Bartram scholars and enthusiasts. She is professor of history at Auburn University.
Dixon Bynum was born in the Delta town of Leland and currently resides in Oxford, Mississippi. A recipient of the Mississippi Arts Commission's state grant for creative nonfiction and, most recently, a finalist for the Richard Margolis Award, he is at work on an environmental memoir set in the Mississippi Delta.
Christopher Camuto is the author of A Fly Fisherman’s Blue Ridge (1990), Another Country: Journeying Toward the Cherokee Mountains (1997), Hunting from Home: A Year Afield in the Blue Ridge (2003), and Time and Tide in Acadia: Seasons on Mount Desert Island (2009). He lives at Wolftree Farm in central Pennsylvania.
Thomas Rain Crowe is a founding editor of Katuah Journal: A Bioregional Journal of the Southern Appalachians, which Gary Snyder called the best bioregional publication in the United States. His memoir Zoro's Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods (2005) is written in the style of Thoreau’s Walden and based on four years of self-sufficient living in a wilderness environment in the woods of Western North Carolina from 1979 to 1982. The book won the Ragan Old North State Award for the best book of nonfiction in the state of North Carolina for 2005, as well as the Southern Environmental Law Center's Philip Reed Memorial Award for Outstanding Writing about the Southern Environment.
Dorinda G. Dallmeyer directs the Environmental Ethics Certificate Program at the University of Georgia. In 2005 the Southern Environmental Law Center presented her with two Philip Reed Memorial Awards for Outstanding Writing about the Southern Environment: one she shared with the University of Georgia Press for her edited anthology Elemental South and the second for an advocacy essay entitled Waiting for a Train. She also assists in managing the Southern Nature Project.
Doug Davis is the executive director of the Smith-Gilbert Gardens in Kennesaw, Georgia. A 1971 graduate of the University of Georgia with degree in ornamental horticulture, Davis has pursued a lifelong interest in plants of all types with a focus on indigenous vegetation. Davis is passionate on environmental matters, an opponent of monoculture, and a throwback on issues of vegetable gardening and harvest preservation.
Jan DeBlieu is the author of four books and dozens of articles and essays about people and nature. Her first book, Hatteras Journal (1987), is considered a regional classic on the Outer Banks. Meant to Be Wild (1991) was chosen as one of the best science books of the year by Library Journal. Wind (1998) won the John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Natural History Writing, the highest national award given for a volume of nature writing. Year of the Comets: A Journey from Sadness to the Stars was published by Shoemaker & Hoard in Spring 2005.
Most of Jan’s work explores the subtle ways we are shaped by the landscapes where we live and work.
In spring 2003, Jan was named the Cape Hatteras Coastkeeper for the North Carolina Coastal Federation, a grassroots environmental group that works to protect coastal waters from pollution.
Some of Bartram’s liveliest descriptions are of the herpetofauna he encountered on his journey. Whit Gibbons is a professor of ecology at the University of Georgia and former head of the Environmental Outreach and Education program at the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory. He is author or editor of eleven books on herpetology and ecology and has published more than 200 articles in scientific journals. He is also author of more than 300 popular articles on ecology in magazines and newspapers.
Thomas Hallock co-edited William Bartram, the Search for Nature's Design: Selected Art, Letters, and Unpublished Writings (2010), and is the author of From the Fallen Tree: Frontier Narratives, Environmental Politics, and the Roots of a National Pastoral (2003), as well as many other scholarly and non-academic essays. A transplant from the northeast, Hallock has been fixing up an old house in St. Petersburg, Florida that he purchased with his partner in 2001. In 2010, he begins a term as president of the Bartram Trail Conference.
A native of Augusta, Georgia, Philip Juras’s love for the landscape began on the many trips his family made to explore the forests and fields of the southeast, and continued to grow through later years of travel through Europe and the United States. In 1990, he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in drawing and painting from the University of Georgia. In 1997, he earned a Master of Landscape Architecture degree from the University of Georgia, writing his thesis on the pre-settlement savannas that once flourished across the southeastern piedmont, a subject that has informed much of his work since then.
An expert kayaker and place-based educator, John Lane's outdoor adventure prose has appeared in Outside, American White Water, Canoe, South Carolina Wildlife, and many other periodicals. His long essays, River Wild, and Confluence: Pacolet River, recently appeared in the anthologies Heart of a Nation (2000) and Adventure America (2005) both from National Geographic Books. Lane has also published books of personal essays, Waist Deep in Black Water (2002) as well as Circling Home (2007), in which Lane's explorations intensify his bonds to family, friends, and colleagues as they sharpen his sense of place.
Over his career as a wildlife ecology professor at Clemson University, Drew
Lanham has committed himself to educating and mentoring young professionals who can
meet the challenges of natural resources conservation ethically, enthusiastically, and with fresh perspectives. A birder and ornithologist, Lanham's research efforts have centered
largely on the habitat relationships of songbirds and other wildlife. More recently a critical aspect of his studies have focused on African-American rural property owners
and how their lands might be sustainably managed to maintain family legacy and healthy
ecological function. A prolific writer and researcher, he has received Clemson University Wildlife Society's Excellence in Teaching Award multiple times,
the John Madden Fellowship from the Outdoor Writer's Association of America, and a Toyota TogetherGreen
Fellowship, among many other honors.
Roger Pinckney was born and raised in the South Carolina Low Country, and educated at the University of South Carolina and the Iowa Writer's Workshop. He lives on Daufuskie Island, the last sparsely settled place on the South Carolina coast, where he works to preserve land and culture. He is the author of The Beaufort Chronicles (1996), Blue Roots (2003), Little Glory (2003), Signs and Wonders (2004), Seventh Son on Sacred Ground (2006), and The Right Side of the River (2008). Additionally, he serves as Senior Editor for Sporting Classics Magazine, is a regular contributor to Orion, Gray's Sporting Journal, other quality outdoor magazines, and is a two-time winner of the South Carolina Fiction Award. Pinckney's second novel, Reefer Moon, was released by the Evening Post Publishing Company in summer 2009.
Writer, naturalist and activist Janisse Ray is author of three books of literary nonfiction. Her much-lauded Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (2000) is a memoir about growing up on a junkyard in the ruined longleaf pine ecosystem of the Southeast. Her other two books, Wildcard Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home (2004) and Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land (2005), also are set in Southern Georgia amid areas of great biodiversity.
Raised in Jackson, Mississippi, Matthew C. Smith currently straddles art and science through his job as mapmaker and GIS analyst with the Mississippi Natural Heritage Program. After finishing a master's degree in geography, he is now pursuing a degree in creative writing for children and young adults through Vermont College of Fine Arts. Smith is also a lifelong naturalist who writes and speaks regularly on natural history.
Gerald Thurmond is a sociologist at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, with a deep interest in the environment. He is the co-editor with John Lane of The Woods Stretched for Miles: New Nature Writing from the South (1999). His essay "Faith's Place" was first published in Crossroads: A Southern Culture Annual and reprinted in a different form in Pride of Place: A Contemporary Anthology of Texas Nature Writing (2006), edited by David Taylor. Two of his essays have been selected for publication in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment.
For additional information about the books and upcoming events, please see the website www.bartramproject.com