Charles Ray has been writing, drawing, painting, and taking pictures since his teens. His first professional writing credit was a byline on a short story that won first place in a national Sunday school magazine when he was twelve or thirteen. During high school, he made pocket money by drawing cartoons for his classmates, and taught himself to paint using panels torn off cardboard boxes as canvasses. His first photo was taken when he was about four years old, when his mother left her old Kodak Brownie unguarded on a table (circa 1949) and he did a selfie, which was lost in a fire at his mother's house, so he's unable to claim credit for invention of selfies.
After graduation from high school in 1962, he joined the army, and spent the next twenty years moving about the world, from Germany to Vietnam, writing poems for Stars and Stripes, moonlighting as a feature writer and photographer for newspapers and magazines, and while serving at Fort Bragg, NC in the 1970s, serving as the editorial cartoonist for The Spring Lake News, a weekly paper in the small community sandwiched between Ft. Bragg and Pope Air Force Base. He's done gag cartoons for a number of publications, many of which are no longer in publication, through no fault of his.
Ray is the author of more than 60 works of fiction and nonfiction, including two mystery series, a western series featuring the famed Buffalo Soldiers of the Ninth Cavalry, and a fictionalized account of the life of Bass Reeves, one of the first African-American deputy U.S. marshals west of the Mississippi, who was hired to track and arrest fugitives in Oklahoma's Indian Territory in the decades after the Civil War.
He grew up in a small town in East Texas (and, by small, the population was 715), which he left before his seventeenth birthday. Since then, he's lived all over the world, and has visited every continent except Antarctica. He now calls Maryland home, living in a Montgomery County suburb just outside Washington, DC.
When he's not writing, drawing, or taking pictures, he plays with his grandchildren, who live nearby, engaged in public speaking or lecturing, and working with a number of non-governmental organizations concerned with history and foreign affairs.
