Tuesday, April 10, 2018, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EDT

Payson Kennedy, Founder and Retired President of the Nantahala Outdoor Center

“Finding Flow: Stories from the Nantahala Outdoor Center”

In 1972, Emory alum Payson Kennedy was working at Georgia Tech and with his wife, Aurelia, was raising four young children in suburban Atlanta. A year later he had given up this conventional life and was living with his family in a new community located on the Nantahala River in the mountains of western North Carolina, working as a raft guide and helping to found the Nantahala Outdoor Center that has since become one of the largest and most successful outdoor recreation businesses in the world.
Payson will talk about his decision to make this change in his search for more frequent experiences of “the flow state” while also sharing stories from many other recent and former NOC employees, all of which he has compiled in a book due out this very April, NOC Stories: Forty-five Years of Changing Lives at the Nantahala Outdoor Center. Our own Stewart Roberts will introduce his life-long friend.