Burnt Offerings

Burnt Offerings is David Ray’s twenty-fourth book, mostly poetry collections, with subjects varying from concerns of wars and those who fight them, responses to living in India, Australia and New Zealand, family, grief for a lost son, the environment, and the lives and influence of various famous literary figures. The latter category includes a book-length volume of poems called Hemingway: A Desperate Life. A memoir, The Endless Search, describes a childhood in Depression-era Oklahoma and family traumas.


David Ray went on to graduate from the University of Chicago and has taught English Literature and Creative Writing at Cornell University, Reed College, the University of Iowa, and the University of Missouri-Kansas City from which he is Professor Emeritus and where he was founding editor of New Letters magazine and “New Letters on the Air” radio program.


He has received awards for his writing, including the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Maurice English Poetry Award, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Poetry Award, and others.


David Ray currently lives in Tucson, Arizona.