Book Signing with Richard Vargas!

Richard Vargas earned his B.A. at Cal State University, Long Beach, where he studied under Gerald Locklin, and Richard Lee. He edited/published five issues of The Tequila Review, 1978-1980, and twelve issues of The Mas Tequila Review from 2010-2015. Vargas received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico, 2010, where he workshopped his poems with Joy Harjo. He was recipient of the 2011 Taos Summer Writers’ Conference Hispanic Writer Award. He was on the faculties of the 2012 10th National Latino Writers Conference and the 2015 Taos Summer Writers’ Conference. Published collections: McLife, 2005; American Jesus, 2007; Guernica, revisited, 2014; How A Civilization Begins, 2022, and leaving a tip at the Blue Moon Motel, 2023. A new collection, The Screw City Poems, (poems about people and places in Rockford, IL during the times he lived and worked there: 1995-2002 and 2015-2018) to be published by Roadside Press, will be released in July 2025. He currently is host of a monthly poetry open mic in Madison (Poetry on Tap@Minocqua Brewing Company: “drink beer and don’t be racist.”) He resides in Wisconsin, near the lake where Otis Redding’s plane crashed.