Ray Gonzalez

Ray Gonzalez is the author of Memory Fever (University of Arizona Press, 1999), a memoir about growing up in the Southwest, Turtle Pictures (Arizona, 2000), which received the 2001 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry, and a collection of essays, The Underground Heart: A Return to a Hidden Landscape (Arizona, 2002), which received the 2003 Carr P. Collins/ Texas Institute of Letters Award for Best Book of Non-fiction, was named one of ten Best Southwest Books of the Year by the Arizona Humanities Commission, named one of the Best Non-fiction Books of the Year by the Rocky Mountain News, and selected as a Book of the Month by the El Paso Public Library.

He is the author of six other books of poetry, including three from BOA Editions--The Heat of Arrivals (1997 PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award), Cabato Sentora (2000 Minnesota Book Award Finalist), and The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande (2002 nominee for The Pulitzer Prize, recipient of a National Book Critic's Circle Award Notable Book Citation, and a 2003 finalist for The Texas Institute of Letters Award in Poetry).

He is also the author of two collections of short stories, The Ghost of John Wayne (Arizona, 2001, winner of a 2002 Western Heritage Award for Best Short Story and a 2002 Latino Heritage Award in Literature) and Circling the Tortilla Dragon (Creative Arts, 2002). His poetry has appeared in the 1999, 2000, and 2003 editions of The Best American Poetry (Scribners) and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses 2000 (Pushcart Press). His non-fiction is included in the second edition of The Norton Anthology of Nature Writing (W.W. Norton). He is the editor of twelve anthologies, most recently No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 American Poets (Tupelo Press, 2002). He has served as Poetry Editor of The Bloomsbury Review for twenty-two years and founded LUNA, a poetry journal, in 1998. He is a Full Professor in the MFA Creative Writing Program at The University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. His awards include a 2003 Lifetime Achievement Award in Literature from The Border Regional Library Association, a 2002 Loft McKnight Fellowship in Poetry, a 2001 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, a 1993 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award for Excellence in Editing, and a 1998 Colorado Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts.