Ray Gonzalez is a poet, essayist and editor born in El Paso, Texas. He is author of Memory Fever (University of Arizona Press 1999), a memoir about growing up in the Southwest, Turtle Pictures (Arizona 2000), which recieved the 2001 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry, and a colletion of essays, The Underground Heart: Essays from Hidden Landscapes (Arizona 2003). He is the author of six other books of poetry, including three from BOA Editions: The Heat of Arrivals, the 1997 PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award, Cabato Sentora, the 2000 Minnesota Book Award Finalist, and The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande (2000). He is also the author of two collections of short stories, The Ghost of John Wayne (Arizona 2001) and Circling the Tortilla Dragon (Creative Arts 2002). His poetry has appeared in the 1999 and 2000 editions of The Best American Poetry and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses 2000. 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 Touching the Fire: Fifteen Poets of the Latino Renaissance (Anchor/Doubleday Books 1998). He has served as poetry editor of The Bloomsbury Review for 22 years and founded Luna, a poetry journal, in 1998. He is an Associate Professor in the MFA Creative Writing Program at The University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.