Ray Gonzalez is the author of eleven books of poetry, including five from BOA Editions: The Heat of Arrivals (1997 PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award), Cabato Sentora (2000 Minnesota Book Award Finalist), The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande (winner of a 2003 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry) and Consideration of the Guitar: New and Selected Poems (2005) and Cool Auditor (2009). Turtle Pictures (Arizona, 2000), a mixed-genre text, received the 2001 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. His poetry has appeared in the 1999, 2000, and 2003 editions of The Best American Poetry (Scribners) and The Pushcart Prize: Best o f the Small Presses 2000 (Pushcart Press). He is also the author of three collections 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, Memory Fever (University of Arizona Press, 1999), a memoir about growing up in the Southwest, and Renaming the Earth: Personal Essays (Arizona, 2008). He has written 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). He is the editor of twelve anthologies, most recently Sudden Fiction Latino (co-edited with Robert Shapard and James Thomas, W.W. Norton, 2010) and No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 American Poets (Tupelo Press, 2002). He has served as Poetry Editor of The Bloomsbury Review for twenty-five years and founded LUNA, a poetry journal, in 1998. He is Full Professor in the MFA Creative Writing Program at The University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and also teaches in the Solstice low residency MFA Program at Pine Manor College in Boston.

Books by Ray Gonzalez:

Other poems on the web by Ray Gonzalez:
Five poems
Four poems
Three poems
Two poems
"Granadilla"
Two poems

About Cool Auditor:

"There is such brilliance and wisdom in Ray Gonzalez's work. His images are at once fantastic, mystical, and literal. At first I am reading of another world, another life, but in the end, I am frightened by my own reflections. It's as if Ray Gonzalez is able to say the unsayable and address the precise point at which the known and the unknowable, and the dream and reality, meet. He stands at the crossroads where every true mystic stands to create. Cool Auditor is truly a book of wonders."
—Nin Andrews

"Ray Gonzalez may be our most essential prose poet right now. Stepping through the doors of the imaginary, thinking about our spiritual life, thinking about music, wondering what the signs mean, or inventing them, he leads us into little, timeless worlds. If the surreal turned into an emblem of yearning, yielding cool, imagistic auditors of the temperature of our souls, then these prose poems would be where we saw what had become of us."
—David Lazar

"Ray Gonzalez's work has evolved over his numerous books of poetry. Each one pushes further toward the new rules for exploring his subjects. He has chosen to write in the prose poem form, known for its openness to wild ideas and compacted language. It is a form that suits his work perfectly. The result is a challenging, highly-accomplished exploration by one of the most brilliant and fiercely original poets writing in the U.S. today."
—Mike Puican