Richard Vargas Poetry Reading

FREE EVENT! Richard Vargas Poetry Reading will be reading from his collection of poems inspired by people and places in Rockford, IL., titled ‘The Screw City Poems’. Poetry, creative non-fiction, and fiction depicting life in a small mid-western town during the 1990s from an outsider’s point of view. Published July 2025 by Roadside Press.

Check our this review of Richard’s Book, ‘The Screw City Poems’

From the author: I am at an age when some poets get lazy and decide it’s time for the “New and Selected” collection of their work. Those of us who are smiled upon by the big publishing houses (don’t look at me) most likely get gentle nudges to just do it and generate some quick book sales. It’s doesn’t take a lot of sweat and tears to put together about twenty-percent unpublished poems that are then padded with poems previously published in their books from years gone by. What they consider to be their “hits,” along with a few misses. In my case, it’s merely an opportunity to present a sampling of my writing from the beginning to the present for those who have not read all my books. Has anyone read all of them? Buy that reader a beer.

Poet 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. 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 sixth book, The Screw City Poems, will be released in July 2025, Roadside Press. He currently resides in Wisconsin, near the lake where Otis Redding’s plane crashed.