Hard Knocks

Ray Lopez is an evangelist, writer, and poet. He also works as a mitigation specialist in federal death penalty cases after retiring in 2016 from a twenty-six-year career as a federal probation officer. Born in Brooklyn in 1959 and raised on Long Island during the sixties and seventies, he journeyed through racism, Catholicism, the counterculture, alcoholism, drug addiction, hospitalization, and jail to find hope in Christ. He earned his master's degree from U.C. Berkeley in English in 1988 and has only recently returned to creative writing. Hard Faith is his third memoir, and he is presently working on his first novel, The Painter. Visit his website, www.memoirofasmallmoment.org, for additional information.