The ArtOrg Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) gallery show opened last Saturday to a great crowd. Here is a link to the photoset of the opening. Art giants David Lefkowitz and Aldo Moroni were in attendance and liked the show. The show continues until November 8, and the hours are 5 to 8 pm on Thursdays and Fridays, and 1 to 4 pm on Saturdays and Sundays. Don’t hesitate to call to arrange a special viewing.

Ray Gonzalez will be reading from his poetry and books this Thursday at 7:30 pm at the ArtOrg gallery. Scott King of the ArtOrg board of directors and Red Dragonfly Press will be introducing Ray. Please come early to take in the art, as well.

Ray Gonzalez is the author of nine books of poetry, including four 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. 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 of the Small Presses 2000 (Pushcart Press). He is also the author of 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, named a Minnesota Book Award Finalist in Memoir, and selected as a Book of the Month by the El Paso Public Library. His other non-fiction book is Memory Fever (University of Arizona Press, 1999), a memoir about growing up in the Southwest. 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). His second mixed-genre text, The Religion of Hands (volume two of the Turtle Pictures trilogy) was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2005. 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 Full Professor in the MFA Creative Writing Program at The University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.