Ray Ring

Ray Ring (Raymond H. Ring) is a novelist and journalist, based in the American West since the 1970s, with stints in Arizona, Colorado and Montana. His four novels are Montana Blues (Writers Canyon Press 2023), Arizona Kiss (original publisher Little, Brown and Company 1991), Peregrine Dream (original publisher St. Martin’s Press 1989) and Telluride Smile (original publisher Dodd, Mead & Company 1988). His journalism has appeared in many publications, as a freelancer and as senior editor of High Country News, correspondent for Outside magazine, and columnist and investigative reporter for The Arizona Daily Star. He’s won twelve national journalism awards, including a George Polk Award for Political Reporting; a Mental Health America Media Award for an essay about his schizophrenic brother, John, committing suicide; and an Investigative Reporters & Editors scroll for going undercover, posing as a convicted murderer in a max-security prison, where he got roughed up by a White supremacist prison gang. He attended six universities, and earned a bachelor's in journalism at the University of Colorado-Boulder in 1979. As a young man in his 20s, he held blue-collar jobs including firefighter, taxi driver, and head of maintenance at the University of Colorado Mountain Research Station. He and his longtime wife, Linda Platts, live in Tucson, where they enjoy hiking and the borderland culture and glimpses of bobcats in the yard or on the roof.